YOU: "I've been reading online about ATMs which are based on Windows XP being attacked by cybercriminals, and I'm worried. Are your ATMs running on Windows?"
THEM: "I'm not sure about the particular technology used in our ATMs, but we've had no security issues thus far."
YOU: "THEN YOU'D BETTER GO CATCH THEM!" Tee hee-hee! (click!) Snicker, snicker, snort, snicker...
If this tax is implemented, there needs to be a distinction between a gift and something that is free for anyone. If someone receives $10,000 in free iTunes music which anyone else would have to pay for, they do then have something of value. However, if iTunes gives away $10,000 of music to all comers for a week, then they set the value of that music to zero, and it should be untaxable. Similarly, an album released for free online should have no taxable value.
It is also a problem that these digital products are often not resellable. What happens if iTunes holds a contest and gives away every track in their library to one lucky person? The taxes would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the person would have no way to resell any of their music in order to afford this tax.
A tax such as this is going to be a giant mess and cost web resellers huge amounts of money to implement, so I hope it is never passed. There are easier ways to raise tax money.
I'm excited about the exclusion of game consoles, assorted media boxes, Linux machines, and all users outside the US. Still, this is a little too open for my tastes. Couldn't they have made it Vista-only?
When is someone going to figure this out? Suppose Media Company X has some recorded shows and live sports coverage they'd like to put online, and make a profit from it. They want to make it available globally, but advertisers are only interested in targeting specific regions.
The solution is to allow any website or company to broadcast this content to any end user for a fee, on a per-minute or per-segment basis. The content will have programmed commercial breaks which the broadcasting website can use any way they see fit. The broadcasting website might accept the stream from X and rebroadcast it themselves, or they might give the end user a unique key which gives their browser permission to receive the stream directly from X.
This creates an environment in which there is profit to be made, and so there will be competition to set up the best service which shows content from X. If I run a website in France, I can set up some deals with local advertisers. If I pay X 30 cents for the right to send a show to a user, and I can collect 60 cents from advertisers, I can make a nice profit. Alternatively, I might allow users to buy credit and simply pay 50 cents per show to watch ad-free.
Meanwhile, X makes a profit without needing to figure out how to deal with advertisers in each country. They also avoid tying their service to a specific type of hardware. Geographic and technological limitations are avoided, so that the largest possible audience can be reached.
If it's really a beta product, they should dump all the user data before they take it to production. After all, it is just test data. No one in their right mind would be using a beta product as their primary email provider, right?
It's true that they should not have told him it was safe to drive. However, they should have told him exactly what the error code meant, and also advised him not to drive. If he then decided to drive based on the meaning of the error code, it would be his risk.
A bigger app store, that's a clever marketing scheme. What will all those iPhone users do when this shiny new app store won't fit on their little screens? They'll be SOL!
If Sun follows this up with the World's Biggest Cell Phone, they're golden.
A series is a great way to tell stories, though. It allows for much more depth and character development than a single movie. It also allows for stories to be told without all the overhead of introducing us to the characters and the setting every time.
The problem is that series are typically weakened by the economics of television. They have to be designed so that people can pick them up in the middle of the series, which means they have to be made simplistic or repetitive. (This wouldn't be a problem if we switched from broadcast to on-demand distribution.)
Also, the length of the series is determined by whether money is being made, rather than being based on the ideal length for the series. This is less of a problem for BBC shows which are publicly funded. For example, the BBC series "Life on Mars" had two short seasons, and ran for just the right length to tell a great episodic story. I didn't see the ABC version, but I know it ran into the old problem of getting canceled and having to wrap things up in a flash.
Any machine that fires a weapon needs to be built with an excessive number of safeguards. If something goes wrong, there should be several checks which shut off the weapon before it ever has a chance to fire. The fact that this machine would go berserk and fire its gun in a big circle shows that there was criminal neglect and carelessness by the developers, and whoever approved this design should probably be on trial.
Hmm, apparently being an astronaut is hard work, but it's also a great experience, and the views can't be beat!
Why even bother writing from space when he could have simply written those generic updates ahead of time? (Perhaps because that approach didn't work out so well for the Chinese.)
I've had a similar experience with a recent Kubuntu install. It did allow me to install the NVidia drivers, but it didn't automatically ask me to do this. I had to track it down.
Furthermore, I can't select the resolution I want. I believe the problem is not the Nvidia driver, but the monitor setup. My monitor is connected through a KVM switch, so it doesn't get detected properly. I have searched for some place to select my monitor model, or even just add an approved resolution, but there is no place like that short of editing the X config files. I tried once and ended up with X errors on reboot, so I reverted the file and haven't touched it.
I also have had many problems with Samba. There is a graphical program to configure Samba, but it just doesn't work. Sigh.
Many online quizzes trick people by not requiring any personal information at the start. Only after a person has spent half an hour considering their responses does the site require an email address or even payment to see the results. Since a person is reluctant to throw away the time they've invested, they are more likely to give in, although they never would have agreed to the terms at the start.
I had this happen to me last year, when trying to take a Myers-Briggs style personality test to see if my scores had changed in the last decade. They gave me only the most basic results, and expected payment for the full results. Now I will never take an online quiz again unless they guarantee to give full results without requiring payment, personal details, "completing one of these offers", etc.
A 1 cm^3 cube of UDD has a surface area of 0.00107639104 sq feet. (Actually, it would be a little more as it rotates in the air.) Unfortunately, the above calculator rounds values off too much to handle this. In fact, it can't really handle it because it isn't able to compensate for compressibility effects and shock waves as we exceed the speed of sound. (Using the Eiffel Tower's height of 1063 ft., it is returning a value of a little over a mile per second!)
So let's try dropping a big piece, say a sphere with a cross sectional area of 1 sq. ft. This will have a radius of sqrt(1 / pi), and hence a volume of (4/3) * pi * (sqrt( 1 / pi))^3, or about 0.75225 cubic feet. This yields an impressive weight of 6,113,486 pounds.
The terminal velocity calculator is cutting us off at 10,000 pounds, but we can punch this out ourselves to get an answer. We just need a reasonable value for the atmospheric density. Through a little trial and error, I found that a value of.001697 gives about the same results as what the terminal velocity calculator returns for 10,000 pound weights. Running the calculation for our weight yields 101,000 ft/sec., or about 19.2 miles/second.
This is surely a ridiculous result, since we're still disregarding compressibility effects, and using dodgy math. Still, it was interesting, and this sort of speed is not impossible. The fastest man made space probe, Helios, traveled at over twice this speed, albeit in a vacuum.
Let's accept the result for now, and compare this to the Chicxulub impact, which is "one of the largest confirmed impact structures in the world; the impacting bolide that formed the crater was at least 10 km (6 mi) in diameter." I don't see any estimates of the bolide's mass or impact velocity. However, we know the impact released 400 zettajoules of energy, or 4x10^23 joules.
Our object would have a kinetic energy of merely 1.3x10^15 joules, so it probably won't be destroying the earth. Still, with the force all directed at such a tiny area, something dramatic is bound to happen. I imagine it would burrow quite deeply, and then release energy upward and outward somehow.
I have no idea how to estimate the hole's depth. If anyone thinks this ludicrous math is enjoyable, feel free to add your own calculations!
Is magnetic tape practical for home backups? Last time I checked, it wasn't. Hard drives offer the best value and reliability I have found for personal backups. Certainly they are far easier and more reliable than burning DVDs.
I would forget about RAID, and instead make your goal to have 3 separate copies of your files on 3 sets of hard drives. One set on hard drives is the live data that you use on your home server. The other two are backups, and you alternate between them, backing up with whatever frequency you deem sufficient. If at all possible, keep one set of drives off site by taking them to work or a friends' place, then swap them after each backup operation.
Write scripts to simplify your backup process, so that it takes as little effort as possible. (I use a simple rsync command.)
Slashdot Mirror
This is a perfect chance to call your bank:
YOU: "I've been reading online about ATMs which are based on Windows XP being attacked by cybercriminals, and I'm worried. Are your ATMs running on Windows?"
THEM: "I'm not sure about the particular technology used in our ATMs, but we've had no security issues thus far."
YOU: "THEN YOU'D BETTER GO CATCH THEM!" Tee hee-hee! (click!) Snicker, snicker, snort, snicker...
Yahoo URL: "No value found"
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=search+engines
Random fun:
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=large+noses
http://www.google.com/squared/search?q=lolcat+pictures
Reply if you find other amusing queries!
If this tax is implemented, there needs to be a distinction between a gift and something that is free for anyone. If someone receives $10,000 in free iTunes music which anyone else would have to pay for, they do then have something of value. However, if iTunes gives away $10,000 of music to all comers for a week, then they set the value of that music to zero, and it should be untaxable. Similarly, an album released for free online should have no taxable value.
It is also a problem that these digital products are often not resellable. What happens if iTunes holds a contest and gives away every track in their library to one lucky person? The taxes would be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the person would have no way to resell any of their music in order to afford this tax.
A tax such as this is going to be a giant mess and cost web resellers huge amounts of money to implement, so I hope it is never passed. There are easier ways to raise tax money.
Well, you can't get much more distant than that.
I believe this "Making a Child" Locating System will be of interest to many Slashdotters.
There's an app for that!
I'm excited about the exclusion of game consoles, assorted media boxes, Linux machines, and all users outside the US. Still, this is a little too open for my tastes. Couldn't they have made it Vista-only?
When is someone going to figure this out? Suppose Media Company X has some recorded shows and live sports coverage they'd like to put online, and make a profit from it. They want to make it available globally, but advertisers are only interested in targeting specific regions.
The solution is to allow any website or company to broadcast this content to any end user for a fee, on a per-minute or per-segment basis. The content will have programmed commercial breaks which the broadcasting website can use any way they see fit. The broadcasting website might accept the stream from X and rebroadcast it themselves, or they might give the end user a unique key which gives their browser permission to receive the stream directly from X.
This creates an environment in which there is profit to be made, and so there will be competition to set up the best service which shows content from X. If I run a website in France, I can set up some deals with local advertisers. If I pay X 30 cents for the right to send a show to a user, and I can collect 60 cents from advertisers, I can make a nice profit. Alternatively, I might allow users to buy credit and simply pay 50 cents per show to watch ad-free.
Meanwhile, X makes a profit without needing to figure out how to deal with advertisers in each country. They also avoid tying their service to a specific type of hardware. Geographic and technological limitations are avoided, so that the largest possible audience can be reached.
If it's really a beta product, they should dump all the user data before they take it to production. After all, it is just test data. No one in their right mind would be using a beta product as their primary email provider, right?
Clearly they only have one chance left to survive. They must clone Steve Jobs!
If it's too sticky even for Hägsta Domstolen, it gets forwarded to Häagen-Dazs. (Now that's what I call a sticky situation!)
I kiid, kiid. I like Adobe -- they're a nice company... for me to poop on!
</triumph>
It's true that they should not have told him it was safe to drive. However, they should have told him exactly what the error code meant, and also advised him not to drive. If he then decided to drive based on the meaning of the error code, it would be his risk.
A bigger app store, that's a clever marketing scheme. What will all those iPhone users do when this shiny new app store won't fit on their little screens? They'll be SOL!
If Sun follows this up with the World's Biggest Cell Phone, they're golden.
A series is a great way to tell stories, though. It allows for much more depth and character development than a single movie. It also allows for stories to be told without all the overhead of introducing us to the characters and the setting every time.
The problem is that series are typically weakened by the economics of television. They have to be designed so that people can pick them up in the middle of the series, which means they have to be made simplistic or repetitive. (This wouldn't be a problem if we switched from broadcast to on-demand distribution.)
Also, the length of the series is determined by whether money is being made, rather than being based on the ideal length for the series. This is less of a problem for BBC shows which are publicly funded. For example, the BBC series "Life on Mars" had two short seasons, and ran for just the right length to tell a great episodic story. I didn't see the ABC version, but I know it ran into the old problem of getting canceled and having to wrap things up in a flash.
Any machine that fires a weapon needs to be built with an excessive number of safeguards. If something goes wrong, there should be several checks which shut off the weapon before it ever has a chance to fire. The fact that this machine would go berserk and fire its gun in a big circle shows that there was criminal neglect and carelessness by the developers, and whoever approved this design should probably be on trial.
What do you mean, useless? You can do ANYTHING at zombo.com!
I was hoping it was this Phillip Johnson. That would have been a real twist.
Actually, now we don't watch computers play games, and then we talk about it on message boards.
Hmm, apparently being an astronaut is hard work, but it's also a great experience, and the views can't be beat!
Why even bother writing from space when he could have simply written those generic updates ahead of time? (Perhaps because that approach didn't work out so well for the Chinese.)
I've had a similar experience with a recent Kubuntu install. It did allow me to install the NVidia drivers, but it didn't automatically ask me to do this. I had to track it down.
Furthermore, I can't select the resolution I want. I believe the problem is not the Nvidia driver, but the monitor setup. My monitor is connected through a KVM switch, so it doesn't get detected properly. I have searched for some place to select my monitor model, or even just add an approved resolution, but there is no place like that short of editing the X config files. I tried once and ended up with X errors on reboot, so I reverted the file and haven't touched it.
I also have had many problems with Samba. There is a graphical program to configure Samba, but it just doesn't work. Sigh.
Gishpuppy looks useful. I hadn't heard of it. I've always used mailinator.
Unfortunately, the personality test I took wanted actual money from me. It's too bad there isn't a bankinator site!
Many online quizzes trick people by not requiring any personal information at the start. Only after a person has spent half an hour considering their responses does the site require an email address or even payment to see the results. Since a person is reluctant to throw away the time they've invested, they are more likely to give in, although they never would have agreed to the terms at the start.
I had this happen to me last year, when trying to take a Myers-Briggs style personality test to see if my scores had changed in the last decade. They gave me only the most basic results, and expected payment for the full results. Now I will never take an online quiz again unless they guarantee to give full results without requiring payment, personal details, "completing one of these offers", etc.
Interesting idea. I found this terminal velocity calculator.
A 1 cm^3 cube of UDD has a surface area of 0.00107639104 sq feet. (Actually, it would be a little more as it rotates in the air.) Unfortunately, the above calculator rounds values off too much to handle this. In fact, it can't really handle it because it isn't able to compensate for compressibility effects and shock waves as we exceed the speed of sound. (Using the Eiffel Tower's height of 1063 ft., it is returning a value of a little over a mile per second!)
So let's try dropping a big piece, say a sphere with a cross sectional area of 1 sq. ft. This will have a radius of sqrt(1 / pi), and hence a volume of (4/3) * pi * (sqrt( 1 / pi))^3, or about 0.75225 cubic feet. This yields an impressive weight of 6,113,486 pounds.
The terminal velocity calculator is cutting us off at 10,000 pounds, but we can punch this out ourselves to get an answer. We just need a reasonable value for the atmospheric density. Through a little trial and error, I found that a value of .001697 gives about the same results as what the terminal velocity calculator returns for 10,000 pound weights. Running the calculation for our weight yields 101,000 ft/sec., or about 19.2 miles/second.
This is surely a ridiculous result, since we're still disregarding compressibility effects, and using dodgy math. Still, it was interesting, and this sort of speed is not impossible. The fastest man made space probe, Helios, traveled at over twice this speed, albeit in a vacuum.
Let's accept the result for now, and compare this to the Chicxulub impact, which is "one of the largest confirmed impact structures in the world; the impacting bolide that formed the crater was at least 10 km (6 mi) in diameter." I don't see any estimates of the bolide's mass or impact velocity. However, we know the impact released 400 zettajoules of energy, or 4x10^23 joules.
Our object would have a kinetic energy of merely 1.3x10^15 joules, so it probably won't be destroying the earth. Still, with the force all directed at such a tiny area, something dramatic is bound to happen. I imagine it would burrow quite deeply, and then release energy upward and outward somehow.
I have no idea how to estimate the hole's depth. If anyone thinks this ludicrous math is enjoyable, feel free to add your own calculations!
Is magnetic tape practical for home backups? Last time I checked, it wasn't. Hard drives offer the best value and reliability I have found for personal backups. Certainly they are far easier and more reliable than burning DVDs.
I would forget about RAID, and instead make your goal to have 3 separate copies of your files on 3 sets of hard drives. One set on hard drives is the live data that you use on your home server. The other two are backups, and you alternate between them, backing up with whatever frequency you deem sufficient. If at all possible, keep one set of drives off site by taking them to work or a friends' place, then swap them after each backup operation.
Write scripts to simplify your backup process, so that it takes as little effort as possible. (I use a simple rsync command.)