fact that Microsoft (may) be allowing more free and open competition, including the actual removal of their own applications like IE, is pretty significant.
Exactly as significant as a prison warden allowing the inmates to request an uninstall of toilets and beds from their cells!
Absolutely no 'good will" on Microsoft's part; they are just electing the lesser evil: open up a little, or lose customers to KDE/Gnome and get sued to boot. What IS significant here is that Microsoft apparently feels threatened.
A properly implemented One-time pad system is unbreakable, even with a 'quamputer':
[Claude Shannon] proved, using information theory considerations, that the [Vernam-Mauborgne] one-time pad has a property he termed perfect secrecy: that is, the ciphertext gives absolutely no additional information about the plaintext. Thus, the a priori probability of a plaintext message M is the same as the a posteriori probability of a plaintext message M given the corresponding ciphertext. And in fact all plaintexts are equally probable. This is a strong notion of cryptanalytic difficulty.
What that means, is that some terrorist's message can be decrypted as a Bible passage, a preamble to the Constitution, or pretty much anything else, and there is no way to tell if it's right or wrong.
This "nany-state" seems to give America all these idiotic laws that hinder business, what with the minimum wage and nondiscrimination laws, Socia Security/Medicare, child literacy, workplace safety regulations, environmental protection standards, antitrust environment, the military.
If I want to hire a 9 y.o. kid to mine coal for me, who is the government to tell me that I should pay for her to go to school instead with my hard-earned tax dollars. If she wanted to not starve, get vaccinations, and learn to read so badly, why did she chose to be born off the trailortrash parents?
I second your oppinion that we abandon all these Government programs as the right step towards qualifying America for a Darwin Award.
Hmm, I guess I botched that attempt at humour. Sorry.
As to your '200 really bright graduate students', where do you think thouse elite 'hackers' come from? Do you think we can pick any random snotnose and train her to grow up to be a scientist?
I submit to you that those 'elite hackers' start off as motivated script-kiddies. Helped by various Talented and Gifted programs. And a bit of motivation early on (e.g. Could you help me fix this radio set, Richard?)
As they say, no dumb theories, just dumb audience, yes?
1) Hong Kong (of China) is producing about 0% of quality games/movies/software 2) Hong Kong is losing about 0% due to piracy each year?
For some reason, however, HK wants 200,000 kiddies to start looking around the places that will introduce them to the underbelly of computing
Now let me ask you, what would China want with some 200,000 script-kiddies?
Considering that the US of A already has a computerized powergrid, huge internet backbone/banking systems/telephone/cellular networks/freaking traffic lights and building ACs? Half of Navy's networked computers still running Win 98? Not even takling about our trends to move towards Aegis-style computerized battlefield management, computer-heavy ABM shields, reliance on sattelites for CCC?
Now the problem is that your battery will only last 2 hours or so with this new 'update'. Yeah, back in the day the original 'Toilet Seat' iBooks could deliver 8-10 hours battery time with no problems exactly because they had no fan.
That's the one thing I cannot stand about Apple: they keep tweaking settings with their updates without giving users any options to adjust them afterwards.
Like disabling SuspendToDisk ('hibernate') option in 9.0->9.0.4 update, removing 'swappiness' control from 10.1, disabling iTunes internet filesharing, etc.
Oh, and microsofting their users by requiring the f***** CD keys.
Engineers are always right; it's just that the Nature seems to be wrong occasionally. Somehow I find it scary that slashdotters seem to know more about the dangers of hydrozine than these NassA 'engineers'.
A humble suggestion: perhaps they should consult some chemists, not the "so-what, we-can-fly-without-it" engineers.
When Columbia broke up, it was the possible presence of Hydrazine from the APUs that make the Texas Dept of Health issue warnings about approaching shuttle debris.
Don't worry, since our Missile Defences tests showed yesterday ( http://www.lcsun-news.com/news/ci_4044160 ), at any sign of danger we can blow that WMD shuttle right out of the sky.
Bad idea. As I recall from my college days, hydrazine is some really nasty stuff. The tiniest quantities will stink like rotting fish, way worse than triethylamine. Plus it's a potent neurotoxin, absorbed through skin or inhaled, with these 6 drops entirely enough to send the whole crew on a shroom-like trip (it would be a drug of choice on the street I think, if not for its HORRIBLE stench). MSDS just doesn't do this baby justice!
Not nasty enough? Well, it's also highly explosive, hence the reason it is used for fueling rockets.
100,000 times slower than what would cause a fire
That's just bull*. Assuming 1 drop is 20 uL or so, that's plenty enough to explode.
Just to show how the dangerous this really is, the hydrazine generators were deemed unsafe for submarines (but A-O.K. for the Space Shuffles, apparently). What next, dynamite sticks as flares?
We have the ALSJ and I don't believe there was a writer in the world (let alone in the US) in the 1960's and '70s who could have written it from scratch.
What are you trying to say here, exactly? Are you claiming the aliens beamed ALSJ down on stardate 3134.0? Or the NASA con-men scripted it?
I just don't care either way. I was merely pointing out to GGP that the reasonable tin-foil hatters never claimed Apollo 11/12 was fake, just that the humans on the Moon part was fake.
You might like to know the likely reason allofmp3's bandwidth costs are so low: the Russian ISPs will charge $0 cost, or even PAY for customer upload to outside of Russia.
Why? It's the way the Internet is setup in Europe: very few backbones, but a lot more direct peering agreements. What that means is that ISPs pay for data downloaded by their customers, and get credit for data uploaded from the customers.
That's not the case in the US; the ISPs have to pay both ways to the back-boners because of the deregulation legislation in the 1990's under Clinton;(
Let me ask, have YOU seen any of these "thousands of hours" of high-res tapes that you refer to. Have you seen a single original frame? The fact is that Williams and Kranz (top brass in charge of the archives and missions at NASA) conceed that the original data is misplaced, believed wiped.
All we have now is re-filmed qvga-res shit: tv-grabs, literally. But don't despair, for NASA, like the OJ, just might finally find the reel killer.
What's funny is that one would need post-doctoral training to even understand just the kind of info one could extract from high-quality TV scans; I do not expect you to understand.
The bottom like is that whether the TV feeds came from the Moon or from a set we will not know until the original tapes can be examined.
I know you are trolling, but the real Moon-hoax tinfoilers never claimed that 'something' didn't land on the Moon, just that no humans from Apollo 11/12 landed on the Moon.
The Hatter idea is that no living thing can escape the atmosphere and survive (due to radiation or whatever reason the Hatters claim). And no, the Space Station and the sattelites are technically inside the atmosphere, well below the Van Allen belt.
The reflector delivery and the soil sample return could be done by a robotic probe, which in fact is what the Russians did with their Luna 16 mission about a year after the alleged Apollo 11.
Since the Russkies got the first sattelite (Sputnik), the first man in orbit, the first suit walk, the first docking, etc., the thinking was that we could sound-stage their glorious defeat, end the darn space-race, then go spend the money on something more profitable.
The credible conspiracy theory: Send the humans into orbit, camp in orbit while the robot fetches the samples, reunite humans with the 'bot, then land as heroes.
Ah, you are right. It looks like Pres. Bush ordered the rest of the system online last month; I did not know that. Perhaps in time for Discovery re-entry?
In the event of a ballistic missile attack, the Russians hope that System A-135 will provide Moscow with two layers of defense. After the Pillbox radar spots an incoming missile, System A-135 will launch its Gorgon interceptors in hopes of destroying the threat in the upper reaches of the atmosphere, or even in outer space. If any incoming warheads penetrate this first layer, the Russians will launch a second wave of Gazelles.(11) The Russian military claims that this two-tiered layered defense is capable of protecting hundreds if not thousands of miles around Moscow, an area that encompasses the nations capital, key military assets, and major industries.(12)
Obviously, it was crippled to comply with the ABM treaties of the time (only ONE radar, only 100 interceptors)
Yet many in the U.S. and elsewhere have pointed out that, while System A-135 might be effective against a single warhead attack, the systems radar and interceptors would be quickly overwhelmed in the event of a multi-warhead strike. According to the Pentagon: With only 100 interceptor missiles, the system can be saturated, and with only the single Pillbox radar at Pushkino providing support to these missiles, the system is highly vulnerable to suppression.
Of course, one must question why do we think we need more than 100 interceptors if we are scared of the terrorists with 1-2 ICBMs.
[...]purpose seem to be propping up the starving defense industry
You say it like 'donating' to weapons development is a bad thing for the US. But when shit hits the fan, America will still have its weapon pipeline even while everything else is outsourced to China...
[...]makes it pretty unlikely that ballistic missiles are the expected intruding weapon of choice.
They aren't. I was merely pointing out why Reagan-style missile defences is hard to build.
Overall, deploying rocket interceptors (like in Patriot) or radar-steered Gatling cannons (like in Phalanx CIWS) is a much better idea, but definitely nowhere as profitable for the supplier.
To be sure, the detection part is least of this system's problems.
The real difficulty is keeping the beam perfectly focused on a moving target (need to re-adjust the focus, keep on precisely the same spot), probably flying during a heavy fog/rain (cannot use IR there).
Why does the beam need to be focused? Because the target energy density would need to be at least on the order of 30 GigaWatt/m^2 (and much more if you are dealing with hardened stuff: e.g. a Russian SS-18).
The work on Ballistic Missile shield lasers involved building a megawatt-range IR deuterium fluoride laser for the cost of about $1,000,000,000. While N-G's local shields would deal with softer targets at closer range, still, expect the cost of a 100kW laser alone to be on the order of 10-100 million. Steep price to pay per airfield, given that one cannot use the darn thing during fog/rain.
Read those about a year ago; it was in part 1 for sure, but don't quite remember if that was 1a or 1b.
The part you are looking for is about Prof. Einstein examining equipment producing a photon ray capable of shooting down shells and blinding pilots. They have good 5 pages on it as I recall, including a kooky newspaper clipping about Einstein't 'death ray', as well as official FBI reports, inquiry letters to the army scientists, and their replies. I think that was right after Stalin's letter was first mentioned.
Anyways, what gagged me up was them saying 'no such thing could be done'
seems to me that whining about $6 a month to run on local energy is cheapass.
Try $60/month? At average price of $0.10/kWh, $0.04/kWh bull shit surcharge will result in 140% premiums over what consumers would pay.
How about you ask your parents how much they are already paying for electricity? I will tell you how much my modest household of two spends: $2000+/year at the current rates in CA; +$0.04/kWh will cost me $60+/month.
10 years ago, from http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/press/press142.html : * The average household spent $1,338 for energy in 1997. Total annual energy expenditures per household were highest in the Northeast ($1,644) and lowest in the West ($1,014).
* Electricity accounted for 35 percent of all the energy consumed in U.S. households in 1997
_____________ Oh, and Ruby, I like your posts, but why do you keep trolling about Iraq? Someone already told you that if we really needed their oil that badly, you could easily drill through glass!
Just to clarify, I am not saying this alternative power thing is a bad thing, I am saying it's lame to hide true costs from people.
While this 'clean energy' could be great for businesses that can earn a buck by being 'green', we cannot expect an average person to pay the extra premium given how expensive everything already is (you guys still in college, just you wait until you get out, you will not know what hit you: $2000/month just for necessities is rough).
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly as significant as a prison warden allowing the inmates to request an uninstall of toilets and beds from their cells!
Absolutely no 'good will" on Microsoft's part; they are just electing the lesser evil: open up a little, or lose customers to KDE/Gnome and get sued to boot. What IS significant here is that Microsoft apparently feels threatened.
What that means, is that some terrorist's message can be decrypted as a Bible passage, a preamble to the Constitution, or pretty much anything else, and there is no way to tell if it's right or wrong.
This "nany-state" seems to give America all these idiotic laws that hinder business, what with the minimum wage and nondiscrimination laws, Socia Security/Medicare, child literacy, workplace safety regulations, environmental protection standards, antitrust environment, the military.
If I want to hire a 9 y.o. kid to mine coal for me, who is the government to tell me that I should pay for her to go to school instead with my hard-earned tax dollars.
If she wanted to not starve, get vaccinations, and learn to read so badly, why did she chose to be born off the trailortrash parents?
I second your oppinion that we abandon all these Government programs as the right step towards qualifying America for a Darwin Award.
Hmm, I guess I botched that attempt at humour. Sorry.
As to your '200 really bright graduate students', where do you think thouse elite 'hackers' come from? Do you think we can pick any random snotnose and train her to grow up to be a scientist?
I submit to you that those 'elite hackers' start off as motivated script-kiddies. Helped by various Talented and Gifted programs. And a bit of motivation early on (e.g. Could you help me fix this radio set, Richard?)
As they say, no dumb theories, just dumb audience, yes?
Oh, and a big lol at your third paragraph.
1) Hong Kong (of China) is producing about 0% of quality games/movies/software
2) Hong Kong is losing about 0% due to piracy each year?
For some reason, however, HK wants 200,000 kiddies to start looking around the places that will introduce them to the underbelly of computing
Now let me ask you, what would China want with some 200,000 script-kiddies?
Considering that the US of A already has a computerized powergrid, huge internet backbone/banking systems/telephone/cellular networks/freaking traffic lights and building ACs? Half of Navy's networked computers still running Win 98?
Not even takling about our trends to move towards Aegis-style computerized battlefield management, computer-heavy ABM shields, reliance on sattelites for CCC?
Now the problem is that your battery will only last 2 hours or so with this new 'update'. Yeah, back in the day the original 'Toilet Seat' iBooks could deliver 8-10 hours battery time with no problems exactly because they had no fan.
That's the one thing I cannot stand about Apple: they keep tweaking settings with their updates without giving users any options to adjust them afterwards.
Like disabling SuspendToDisk ('hibernate') option in 9.0->9.0.4 update, removing 'swappiness' control from 10.1, disabling iTunes internet filesharing, etc.
Oh, and microsofting their users by requiring the f***** CD keys.
Tell that to the Mars Climate Orbiter. Cause you know, newtons == ft-lb.
Engineers are always right; it's just that the Nature seems to be wrong occasionally. Somehow I find it scary that slashdotters seem to know more about the dangers of hydrozine than these NassA 'engineers'.
A humble suggestion: perhaps they should consult some chemists, not the "so-what, we-can-fly-without-it" engineers.
Wrong.
it's people like you that make us depend on alien engineers.
Don't worry, since our Missile Defences tests showed yesterday ( http://www.lcsun-news.com/news/ci_4044160 ), at any sign of danger we can blow that WMD shuttle right out of the sky.
____
Laugh, dammit.
Not nasty enough? Well, it's also highly explosive, hence the reason it is used for fueling rockets.
That's just bull*. Assuming 1 drop is 20 uL or so, that's plenty enough to explode.
Just to show how the dangerous this really is, the hydrazine generators were deemed unsafe for submarines (but A-O.K. for the Space Shuffles, apparently). What next, dynamite sticks as flares?
What are you trying to say here, exactly?
Are you claiming the aliens beamed ALSJ down on stardate 3134.0? Or the NASA con-men scripted it?
I just don't care either way. I was merely pointing out to GGP that the reasonable tin-foil hatters never claimed Apollo 11/12 was fake, just that the humans on the Moon part was fake.
You might like to know the likely reason allofmp3's bandwidth costs are so low: the Russian ISPs will charge $0 cost, or even PAY for customer upload to outside of Russia.
;(
Why? It's the way the Internet is setup in Europe: very few backbones, but a lot more direct peering agreements. What that means is that ISPs pay for data downloaded by their customers, and get credit for data uploaded from the customers.
That's not the case in the US; the ISPs have to pay both ways to the back-boners because of the deregulation legislation in the 1990's under Clinton
http://science.slashdot.org/science/06/07/13/16542 00.shtml Apollo 11 TV Tapes Go Missing
Let me ask, have YOU seen any of these "thousands of hours" of high-res tapes that you refer to. Have you seen a single original frame? The fact is that Williams and Kranz (top brass in charge of the archives and missions at NASA) conceed that the original data is misplaced, believed wiped.
All we have now is re-filmed qvga-res shit: tv-grabs, literally.
But don't despair, for NASA, like the OJ, just might finally find the reel killer.
What's funny is that one would need post-doctoral training to even understand just the kind of info one could extract from high-quality TV scans; I do not expect you to understand.
The bottom like is that whether the TV feeds came from the Moon or from a set we will not know until the original tapes can be examined.
I know you are trolling, but the real Moon-hoax tinfoilers never claimed that 'something' didn't land on the Moon, just that no humans from Apollo 11/12 landed on the Moon.
The Hatter idea is that no living thing can escape the atmosphere and survive (due to radiation or whatever reason the Hatters claim). And no, the Space Station and the sattelites are technically inside the atmosphere, well below the Van Allen belt.
The reflector delivery and the soil sample return could be done by a robotic probe, which in fact is what the Russians did with their Luna 16 mission about a year after the alleged Apollo 11.
Since the Russkies got the first sattelite (Sputnik), the first man in orbit, the first suit walk, the first docking, etc., the thinking was that we could sound-stage their glorious defeat, end the darn space-race, then go spend the money on something more profitable.
The credible conspiracy theory: Send the humans into orbit, camp in orbit while the robot fetches the samples, reunite humans with the 'bot, then land as heroes.
In Soviet Russia, crabs get you.
Ah, you are right. It looks like Pres. Bush ordered the rest of the system online last month; I did not know that. Perhaps in time for Discovery re-entry?
Aww, I made myself sad.
Obviously, it was crippled to comply with the ABM treaties of the time (only ONE radar, only 100 interceptors)
Of course, one must question why do we think we need more than 100 interceptors if we are scared of the terrorists with 1-2 ICBMs.
Yes, but a better question would be:
Does it run MacOS X_86? (or can be 'patched' to do so instead of buying MacBook-clone hardware)
You say it like 'donating' to weapons development is a bad thing for the US. But when shit hits the fan, America will still have its weapon pipeline even while everything else is outsourced to China...
They aren't. I was merely pointing out why Reagan-style missile defences is hard to build.
Overall, deploying rocket interceptors (like in Patriot) or radar-steered Gatling cannons (like in Phalanx CIWS) is a much better idea, but definitely nowhere as profitable for the supplier.
To be sure, the detection part is least of this system's problems.
The real difficulty is keeping the beam perfectly focused on a moving target (need to re-adjust the focus, keep on precisely the same spot), probably flying during a heavy fog/rain (cannot use IR there).
Why does the beam need to be focused? Because the target energy density would need to be at least on the order of 30 GigaWatt/m^2 (and much more if you are dealing with hardened stuff: e.g. a Russian SS-18).
The work on Ballistic Missile shield lasers involved building a megawatt-range IR deuterium fluoride laser for the cost of about $1,000,000,000. While N-G's local shields would deal with softer targets at closer range, still, expect the cost of a 100kW laser alone to be on the order of 10-100 million. Steep price to pay per airfield, given that one cannot use the darn thing during fog/rain.
How about this?
Either use asynchrous and non-blocking calls throughout, OR use multiple threads.
Nobody reads George Orwell anymore. Documentaries are boring, you see.
Read those about a year ago; it was in part 1 for sure, but don't quite remember if that was 1a or 1b.
The part you are looking for is about Prof. Einstein examining equipment producing a photon ray capable of shooting down shells and blinding pilots. They have good 5 pages on it as I recall, including a kooky newspaper clipping about Einstein't 'death ray', as well as official FBI reports, inquiry letters to the army scientists, and their replies. I think that was right after Stalin's letter was first mentioned.
Anyways, what gagged me up was them saying 'no such thing could be done'
Try $60/month? At average price of $0.10/kWh, $0.04/kWh bull shit surcharge will result in 140% premiums over what consumers would pay.
How about you ask your parents how much they are already paying for electricity? I will tell you how much my modest household of two spends: $2000+/year at the current rates in CA; +$0.04/kWh will cost me $60+/month.
10 years ago, from http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/press/press142.html :
* The average household spent $1,338 for energy in 1997. Total annual energy expenditures per household were highest in the Northeast ($1,644) and lowest in the West ($1,014).
* Electricity accounted for 35 percent of all the energy consumed in U.S. households in 1997
_____________
Oh, and Ruby, I like your posts, but why do you keep trolling about Iraq? Someone already told you that if we really needed their oil that badly, you could easily drill through glass!
Just to clarify, I am not saying this alternative power thing is a bad thing, I am saying it's lame to hide true costs from people.
While this 'clean energy' could be great for businesses that can earn a buck by being 'green', we cannot expect an average person to pay the extra premium given how expensive everything already is (you guys still in college, just you wait until you get out, you will not know what hit you: $2000/month just for necessities is rough).