Advertisers have a hard time trying to advertise to the right demographics. Anyone who's worked in any business that has an advertising budget (pretty much any business) knows that setting up advertising campaigns is like throwing a dart in the dark at a dartboard a mile away.
With social networking sites, everybody will give you their information – with that kind of information disclosure, there's almost no need for research teams!
Of course, there's the whole pedophile stalking issue, but without them we would never have those entertaining Dateline NBC series. As long as people aren't stealing identities and slapping their watermark on them, we should be fine.
Jigsaw isn't putting up your grandmother's Social Security number, nor is it hosting pictures of you and your dog. All they host (and all they want) is business contact information. This isn't a violation of privacy... it's a boon for businesses to contact other businesses. It has no desire to be a Zabasearch clone.
If the submitter had bothered to read the article, they would've seen this very important message:
Jigsaw wants only business information. The company won't take home addresses, cell phone numbers or e-mail addresses from Gmail, AOL, Yahoo or other domains that are not identifiable business e-mails. "Jigsaw doesn't touch non-business information with a 10-foot pole..."
So there you go. Someone decides to conglomerate the information any moron can find in a "Contact" page on a corporate Web site, and the privacy nuts freak out — despite the fact that it has nothing to do with privacy. I love how some people commented about creating fake identites and submitting them. Well, unless Mr. John Doe has his own domain and business license, I don't think that fake info will do any good!
Perhaps CowboyNeal needs to see a psychiatrist about his manic-depressive and schizophrenic paranoia disorders. At the very least, he should apologize to Jigsaw (if not to all of Slashdot).
It's nice to see someone with at least one semester's worth of economics classes on Slashdot.
Now, let's not kid ourselves here: the poor developers in India are being exploited. The average salary is around $390/mo.; a kid working part-time down at the local McDonald's in the U.S. make far more money than that. Sure, the cost of living is a little lower over there, but things like books and computers (and commodities such as drinking water, electricity, and gasoline) still cost the same or more than they do here.
Convering salaries directly my multiplying or dividing by the exchange rate without taking into account the Purchasing Power Parity is just plain ridiculous. To sum it up for the economically-inept Slashdot crowd:
The PPP measures how much a currency can buy in terms of an international measure (usually in U.S. dollars), since goods and services have different prices in some countries than in others).
Goods and services cost an order of magnitude less in India and China than they do in the United States. For example: a loaf of bread costs about INR 20 (about $0.43). A monthly lease in a nice, spacious house would be about INR 15000 (about $323). That might seem cheap, but consider this: your average non-American software engineer working in India or China would end up spending about 50% on his or her salary on food alone (Americans, on the other hand, barely spend 8% -- and it keeps going down thanks to genetic engineering).
If the exchange rates were to suddenly fluctuate (as they have before), employing people in India and China could become economically unviable. However, that would simply translate to more lower-knowledge work ("shit jobs") in the U.S. -- something that no self-respecting American college graduate would go near. Not much damage to our economy there.
Writing software for a Mac and/or Linux is a very different proposition from fabricating hardware for a niche music player.
As expensive as software development is, it doesn't really compare with tooling a factory for making hardware that works with a specific MP3 player, then programming the firmware for said device.
The iPod has been using pretty much the same dock connector for a couple years now, so if you make a gadget for the iPod dock connector there's damn near 50 million potential customers out there.
Creative has clawed it's way to be the biggest of "the rest of them" with the Zen (at least in terms of last year's sales), but I wouldn't be surprised if somebody came out with a statistic that said there were more iRivers out there than Zens. If you are going to go after the "not an iPod" market, your best bet is to make generic gadgets which plug into the headphone jack of any player, and don't rely on the manufacturer-specific features on one niche player.
The iPod is far from perfect. It needs more RAM, and still lacks gapless MP3 playback (a major buzz-kill), but with its market dominance and it's dock connector with standardized pin-outs, it's no surprise that it's what most manufacturers are building accessories for.
If I'm the CEO of "SuperCoolOggAndMP3Players, inc.", I'd be talking to Apple about licensing the iPod dock for my player. It probably would not be a cheap deal, but it would give me a leg up over Creative and all the other also-rans out there, including the upcoming players from Microsoft.
Then again... being a sore loser, rolling on the ground kicking and screaming, and extorting $100,000,000 out of a company would probably make Creative more money than their iRivers ever would. Maybe frivolous corporate lawsuits are the future of "competition".
I believe that, with current regulations in the United States, the recommended youngest age for owning a cell phone should be 18 (give or take a few years). Here's my reasoning behind this approximate age limit:
Those $6.99/mo. "free" ringtones that are advertised between airings of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Digimon: Digital Monsters. A responsible person (minor or not!) would see right through that deception and wouldn't even consider buying something from those deceitful advertisers. Unfortunately, there's lots of 13-year-olds who fall for it, and it can cost their parents hundreds of dollars — hundreds of dollars that aren't easily disputed!
Minors cannot get credit cards. For the most part, you need a credit card to buy a non-prepaid cell phone plan. Therefore, minors shouldn't operate a device that's easily abused and requires a line of credit.
Cell phone providers have lots of mechanisms to prevent false/mistaken charges from being made, but subscribers rarely take advantage of them. It's typically only inquired about after a little Zach Morris wannabe makes a two-hour call to Akihabara at a rate of ¥130/min.
If you're a parent with a whiny kid who demands a cell phone, do your research. There are models out there that can be "locked in" to only allow a few phone numbers to be called. Wireless providers like Verizon can change your plan so it blocks the sending and receiving of text messages (those cost up to ten cents each!). Remember: you're basically giving your kid access to your line of credit — control your kids' spending like you control your own spending!
OK - don't use the super sensitive machine and let *ONE* terrorist through.
Nobody has found terrorists at any point in history with chemical analysis machines, and they've been in use for years (they can't detect a ceramic knife). The incident at Heathrow was taken care of by good old-fashioned detective work.
Maybe you've lost your faith in the art of investigation, but I sure haven't. I have, however, lost my faith in having a civilized conversation with you on Slashdot. (mods: feel free to mod this down as "flamebait")
So? Take each positive aside and check 'em! Where's the problem there?
The problem is that, if Heathrow Airport has about 70,000,000 passengers per year (1,000,000 flights × 70 passengers per flight [just guessing on this!]), that we'll have 70,000 suspected terrorists a year. That's about 2000 searches a day.
Something tells me that, despite how popular Al-Qaeda looks on television, that there aren't 2000 terrorists in an airport at any given time. See what I'm saying?
If you have these exquisitly sensitive machines that can detect even a few molecules of material, aren't they by the same token super-vulnerable to being attacked by "chaffing" or overloading?
You have to look at the false positive and negative rates for detection. If you have a test that is 99.99% specific, it will still fail in practical use in an airport, as that means that 1 out of 10,000 people will come up positive. If you have a lot of people going through you will still have a big problem (London had over a million flights last year). This is the same issue as using automatic detection of terrorists – It's one thing to match/no match a known ID (e.g. biometric passport) to a person; it's another to match every passer by to every known terrorist.
Going back to chemical detection: this level of sensitivity will mean that every person runs the risk of coming up positive eventually. This amounts probably about 100,000 people in the U.S., and lots more elsewhere in the world.
Why are we suddenly supporting ICANN? Because it's an opportunity to attack the U.S.? Come on – wasn't this the same organization that held meetings on critical issues in Ghana so that critics wouldn't come?
Gee, let's hold an important meeting on how much we'll let the public participate in ICANN in a country with less than impressive internal stability so the critics will be scared away! BRILLIANT!
Sorry, given the choice of ICANN control of root servers and U.S. control of root servers... I'll stick with the current well functioning system. One of the two is subject to political pressure from somebody.
Paper is a friggin' waste to recycle. It's biodegradable for one. The tree's used to make it in the U.S. all come from tree farms. These trees are grown specifically for this purpose, so no one is running into virgin forests cutting down all the trees for paper. There does exist opposing research for both sides on the topic of set asides and the increased cost to consumers for packaging. I think the cost difference is negligible and definitely worth the process of forest conservation. On the topic of pollution, no one really talks about it. It's kinda like a dirty secret. To recycle paper you need to put it through basically the same process as making it - which is horrible for the environment. So, instead of making an inferior product that causes the same amount of environmental damage to produce and doesn't save the forests - I'd have to say no. Tree farms save the U.S. forests in conjunction with set asides.
The Morris worm was a flash in the pan compared to the neverending parade of WinDOS remote exploits and email/word/excel viruses.The Morris worm inspired Unix vendors to change their habits. Microsoft seems immune from the pressures that make most companies fix their screwups.
Back when everyone had to worry about link and boot sector viruses, you would get laughed off the board for suggesting something like an email virus.
Call this one number to opt out of all three bureaus. You can protect yourself from identity theft by taking your name off of the credit bureaus mailing lists. The credit bureaus are one of the biggest offender when it comes to selling your name and information to the credit card companies who in turn send you all those pre-approved applications. One call to the Opt Out Request Line (for Equifax, TransUnion, Experian and Consumer Credit Associates) is all it takes to permanently remove your name from all marketing lists that the credit agencies supply to direct marketers. You can also opt for a two-year period, renewing your request at any time in the future.
Identity theft certainly happens on the Internet, but it's the old-fashioned cons that usually get your SSN and such. Put your paranoia in the right place. Please.
You forgot number seven. Should it be a troll? Or perhaps you forgot Poland?
Beyond your ability to count, the article seems quite interesting. My PhD supervisor made an intesresting comment about Google the other day: he said that people at Google must have very interesting information concerning the trends of "common knowledge," this is, before September, 11, 2001 a Google search for "september wtc" would yield totally different results, which surely will show the most "common" of things that people was searching for.
Likewise, if you searched for "Katrina" in Google before August 2005, you maybe ended in the page of someone named like that.
These are basic examples of informaiton that can be obtained with the "time" factor of the Google logs. Remember that time gives another dimension to your data, which lets you extract more information from it. Something among tht lines of image-pattern recognition, it is easier to match patterns from a moving image than from a static image.
Let's review some notably successful attacks and see if we can learn something...
In the destruction of the WTC, they used airline tickets and box cutters to commandeer commercial airlines and crash them into buildings having significant economic and human impact.
In the London tube bombings they repeated a tactic already proven in Spain, to use relatively small amounts of common explosives to wreck mass transit facilities.
In other parts of the world (including a prior attempt on the WTC) they have used car and truck bombs made of kerosene and fertilizer to achieve frighteningly effective results.
There is an awful lot of effort being expended protecting us from complex high-tech attacks, when the demonstrated pattern has been for Al Qaeda to use relatively low-tech methods and strike at targets that are easy to hit and achieve significant headlines. If we should learn anything from this, it is that Al Qaeda spends its terrorist money well, getting maximum effect for a minimum of resource.
What we need is more thought and less hasty action, so that we too, might be capable of effective action in return. Pointless blustering actions like this, intended to reassure the public and sustain existing administrations' terms in office, do more to aide and abet the enemy than to frustrate them. We need reason and logic as our allies, instead of keeping them locked in the basement.
The risks still add up, even when you use this machine:
If the rate of false positives is low, a lot of people will get through quickly, but if you are one of the false positives, you may well get a very bad deal at the airport. Having been singled out on one trip to the U.S. for no apparent reason (Probably because I took a "one way" flight so maybe they thought I was not planning to return!) I can assure you its no fun if you end up on the wrong end of a statistical test.
If there are too many false positives, people get angry. After all, how many people in the history of all plane flight have put explosives on a plane? A few dozen maybe, probably less than 100 in all, but any test will likely have many more false positives, and this will mean that these people get ignored.
You may still be using the wrong test, and get falsely reassured. After all, the 9/11 hijackers would have passed a chemical detection test, so they would have been fine to board, no? Again, the real problem here wasn't that the test systems failed, it was the human management of the system - people weren't serious enough about the tests that were already in place.
So, you end up putting a lot of money into doing something that will help very few flights, incovenience a large total number of innocent people, and possibly not protect the public at all.
Knoppix is a linux distroy anyone can use, the automated hardware detection etc is supurb. The DVD 4.0 version does demonstrate a lot of the incompatability issues he's talking about though. because knoppix has about 6 GB of applications (they're compressed on the DVD image) many of the applications are broken.
Debian is the distro Knoppix is based of of, so it has really good hardware detection, but the "stable" version is using the "older" proven stable detection routines. That means it doesn't configure everything perfectly; for instance I had to enable DMA on my DVD-ROM, and I had to use k3b to "configure the system" for CD/DVD burning.
I also have the advantage of having prior experience, So I know how to install Flash support for my secondary browser, and how to configure Java (which isn't included in Debian because it's not FOSS). I knew that the FOSS drivers suck compared to the proprietary ones, so I knew where to find them, and I knew what settings to set in the "install" script for them, because I've been messing around with X11 config files for years now!
So basically, initial set up is probably beyond most users, but the same is true of Windows XP. Most Windows users can't even install applications by themselves, and when they try to the end up with a million spyware programs.
Debian is "ready" for the desktop: the installer is painless for geeks, and simple enough for rice boys. A few noobs might even get lucky with it. The stable version while old, has a very simple gui based app finder that anyone who can use Download.com can learn how to use.
Quite simply, Intel no longer uses CISC. Sure, the instruction set is CISC, but it's all microcode reduced to RISC instructions underneath the hood (which was done way back with the Pentium II and may have partially been implemented on the original Pentium). MMX has been dead for a while, replaced by SIMD and SIMD2, which can actually run in parallel to the floating point unit and no longer requires a context switch. Seriously though, outside of the math world, you probably don't need either unless you're doing software rendering of graphics -- the original reason for MMX was to speed up processing of games and video effects in software and this work is now pretty much entirely handled by the GPU.
C'mon, at least Intel is trying. We can't divide 1 by 3 with our base-10 system and our society has yet to crumble. If you want more precision, just use more bits. I'm sure you can figure it out -- after all, you're better than Intel!
Who needs posters? In memoriam James Doohan. The longest surviving "Red Shirt" on the USS Enterprise, his "Scotty" set the standard for generations of geeks and engineers. Working with the latest future technologies, often experimental, under a demanding boss for whom FTL travel, teleporters, galactic communications and more firepower than all of 20th Century Earth combined weren't enough to cakewalk through missions on any given week, Scotty's role model has influenced millions of 20th Century predecessors. His ingenuity, fortitude, and sense of humor while telling the boss that his demands are insane, but doable, even under excruciating time pressure floating around a newly discovered dimension, are an inspiration to us all. Mr. Doohan, in your new journey, go as boldly as you led us in all your merely astral journeys on our televisions, and in our imaginations.
Anyway, isn't this a 4chan fad? What's next, posting YTMND sites on Slashdot's front page?
A lot of the whining revolves around the obligatory "here goes the government again" comments.
Perhaps I'm a bit naïve, but it seems obvious to me that jumping on some website hosted in some third-world country and giving them my credit card so I can play poker through some system controlled by the website against God-knows-who just seems like an invitation to get ripped off.
I'm just not surprised in the least bit to hear some online gambling site shut down or involved parties being arrested for fraud or whatever. Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken this long for some government somewhere to actually look at these sites and realize that there is no way at all to stop the owners thereof from ripping off customers coming and going (aside from the massive amounts of money they make simply from the actual gambling itself).
I've got one of the smallest lists of "things I love that our government has its fingers in," but you should also realize that along with the money the government collects around legalized gambling in the U.S., they also regulate it massivly and crack down fast and hard on places that are ripping people off (above the fact that gambling itself is a ripoff).
Australia has a VERY vibrant gambling scene. There are areas of the country where people pile most of their monthly salary into slot machines (which they call "pokies"). Australia has one of the highest concentration of poker machines in the world, and a high percentage of gambling addicts per capita.
Australia isn't interested in banning gambling as it brings in so much money. They just want to ban online gambling, as the money is likely to leave the country and not get taxed by the Australian government! This is protectionism, not some moral judgement on the part of the Australian government.
I wonder how long it'll be till Bush passes a law so that non-US companies can no longer advertise to US customers. It'll stop money leaving the US economy after all, and reduce the gaping trade deficit.
Slashdot Mirror
Advertisers have a hard time trying to advertise to the right demographics. Anyone who's worked in any business that has an advertising budget (pretty much any business) knows that setting up advertising campaigns is like throwing a dart in the dark at a dartboard a mile away.
With social networking sites, everybody will give you their information – with that kind of information disclosure, there's almost no need for research teams!
Of course, there's the whole pedophile stalking issue, but without them we would never have those entertaining Dateline NBC series. As long as people aren't stealing identities and slapping their watermark on them, we should be fine.
Jigsaw isn't putting up your grandmother's Social Security number, nor is it hosting pictures of you and your dog. All they host (and all they want) is business contact information. This isn't a violation of privacy... it's a boon for businesses to contact other businesses. It has no desire to be a Zabasearch clone.
If the submitter had bothered to read the article, they would've seen this very important message:
So there you go. Someone decides to conglomerate the information any moron can find in a "Contact" page on a corporate Web site, and the privacy nuts freak out — despite the fact that it has nothing to do with privacy. I love how some people commented about creating fake identites and submitting them. Well, unless Mr. John Doe has his own domain and business license, I don't think that fake info will do any good!
Perhaps CowboyNeal needs to see a psychiatrist about his manic-depressive and schizophrenic paranoia disorders. At the very least, he should apologize to Jigsaw (if not to all of Slashdot).
It's nice to see someone with at least one semester's worth of economics classes on Slashdot.
Now, let's not kid ourselves here: the poor developers in India are being exploited. The average salary is around $390/mo.; a kid working part-time down at the local McDonald's in the U.S. make far more money than that. Sure, the cost of living is a little lower over there, but things like books and computers (and commodities such as drinking water, electricity, and gasoline) still cost the same or more than they do here.
Convering salaries directly my multiplying or dividing by the exchange rate without taking into account the Purchasing Power Parity is just plain ridiculous. To sum it up for the economically-inept Slashdot crowd:
Goods and services cost an order of magnitude less in India and China than they do in the United States. For example: a loaf of bread costs about INR 20 (about $0.43). A monthly lease in a nice, spacious house would be about INR 15000 (about $323). That might seem cheap, but consider this: your average non-American software engineer working in India or China would end up spending about 50% on his or her salary on food alone (Americans, on the other hand, barely spend 8% -- and it keeps going down thanks to genetic engineering).
If the exchange rates were to suddenly fluctuate (as they have before), employing people in India and China could become economically unviable. However, that would simply translate to more lower-knowledge work ("shit jobs") in the U.S. -- something that no self-respecting American college graduate would go near. Not much damage to our economy there.
Writing software for a Mac and/or Linux is a very different proposition from fabricating hardware for a niche music player.
As expensive as software development is, it doesn't really compare with tooling a factory for making hardware that works with a specific MP3 player, then programming the firmware for said device.
The iPod has been using pretty much the same dock connector for a couple years now, so if you make a gadget for the iPod dock connector there's damn near 50 million potential customers out there.
Creative has clawed it's way to be the biggest of "the rest of them" with the Zen (at least in terms of last year's sales), but I wouldn't be surprised if somebody came out with a statistic that said there were more iRivers out there than Zens. If you are going to go after the "not an iPod" market, your best bet is to make generic gadgets which plug into the headphone jack of any player, and don't rely on the manufacturer-specific features on one niche player.
The iPod is far from perfect. It needs more RAM, and still lacks gapless MP3 playback (a major buzz-kill), but with its market dominance and it's dock connector with standardized pin-outs, it's no surprise that it's what most manufacturers are building accessories for.
If I'm the CEO of "SuperCoolOggAndMP3Players, inc.", I'd be talking to Apple about licensing the iPod dock for my player. It probably would not be a cheap deal, but it would give me a leg up over Creative and all the other also-rans out there, including the upcoming players from Microsoft.
Then again... being a sore loser, rolling on the ground kicking and screaming, and extorting $100,000,000 out of a company would probably make Creative more money than their iRivers ever would. Maybe frivolous corporate lawsuits are the future of "competition".
CmdrTaco said:
...the problem is maturity and responsibility.
I believe that, with current regulations in the United States, the recommended youngest age for owning a cell phone should be 18 (give or take a few years). Here's my reasoning behind this approximate age limit:
If you're a parent with a whiny kid who demands a cell phone, do your research. There are models out there that can be "locked in" to only allow a few phone numbers to be called. Wireless providers like Verizon can change your plan so it blocks the sending and receiving of text messages (those cost up to ten cents each!). Remember: you're basically giving your kid access to your line of credit — control your kids' spending like you control your own spending!
AddressException said:
Nobody has found terrorists at any point in history with chemical analysis machines, and they've been in use for years (they can't detect a ceramic knife). The incident at Heathrow was taken care of by good old-fashioned detective work.
Maybe you've lost your faith in the art of investigation, but I sure haven't. I have, however, lost my faith in having a civilized conversation with you on Slashdot. (mods: feel free to mod this down as "flamebait")
AddressException said:
The problem is that, if Heathrow Airport has about 70,000,000 passengers per year (1,000,000 flights × 70 passengers per flight [just guessing on this!]), that we'll have 70,000 suspected terrorists a year. That's about 2000 searches a day.
Something tells me that, despite how popular Al-Qaeda looks on television, that there aren't 2000 terrorists in an airport at any given time. See what I'm saying?
If you have these exquisitly sensitive machines that can detect even a few molecules of material, aren't they by the same token super-vulnerable to being attacked by "chaffing" or overloading?
You have to look at the false positive and negative rates for detection. If you have a test that is 99.99% specific, it will still fail in practical use in an airport, as that means that 1 out of 10,000 people will come up positive. If you have a lot of people going through you will still have a big problem (London had over a million flights last year). This is the same issue as using automatic detection of terrorists – It's one thing to match/no match a known ID (e.g. biometric passport) to a person; it's another to match every passer by to every known terrorist.
Going back to chemical detection: this level of sensitivity will mean that every person runs the risk of coming up positive eventually. This amounts probably about 100,000 people in the U.S., and lots more elsewhere in the world.
Why are we suddenly supporting ICANN? Because it's an opportunity to attack the U.S.? Come on – wasn't this the same organization that held meetings on critical issues in Ghana so that critics wouldn't come?
Sorry, given the choice of ICANN control of root servers and U.S. control of root servers... I'll stick with the current well functioning system. One of the two is subject to political pressure from somebody.
Paper is a friggin' waste to recycle. It's biodegradable for one. The tree's used to make it in the U.S. all come from tree farms. These trees are grown specifically for this purpose, so no one is running into virgin forests cutting down all the trees for paper. There does exist opposing research for both sides on the topic of set asides and the increased cost to consumers for packaging. I think the cost difference is negligible and definitely worth the process of forest conservation. On the topic of pollution, no one really talks about it. It's kinda like a dirty secret. To recycle paper you need to put it through basically the same process as making it - which is horrible for the environment. So, instead of making an inferior product that causes the same amount of environmental damage to produce and doesn't save the forests - I'd have to say no. Tree farms save the U.S. forests in conjunction with set asides.
The Morris worm was a flash in the pan compared to the neverending parade of WinDOS remote exploits and email/word/excel viruses.The Morris worm inspired Unix vendors to change their habits. Microsoft seems immune from the pressures that make most companies fix their screwups.
Back when everyone had to worry about link and boot sector viruses, you would get laughed off the board for suggesting something like an email virus.
1-888-567-8688
Call this one number to opt out of all three bureaus. You can protect yourself from identity theft by taking your name off of the credit bureaus mailing lists. The credit bureaus are one of the biggest offender when it comes to selling your name and information to the credit card companies who in turn send you all those pre-approved applications. One call to the Opt Out Request Line (for Equifax, TransUnion, Experian and Consumer Credit Associates) is all it takes to permanently remove your name from all marketing lists that the credit agencies supply to direct marketers. You can also opt for a two-year period, renewing your request at any time in the future.
Identity theft certainly happens on the Internet, but it's the old-fashioned cons that usually get your SSN and such. Put your paranoia in the right place. Please.
You forgot number seven. Should it be a troll? Or perhaps you forgot Poland?
Beyond your ability to count, the article seems quite interesting. My PhD supervisor made an intesresting comment about Google the other day: he said that people at Google must have very interesting information concerning the trends of "common knowledge," this is, before September, 11, 2001 a Google search for "september wtc" would yield totally different results, which surely will show the most "common" of things that people was searching for.
Likewise, if you searched for "Katrina" in Google before August 2005, you maybe ended in the page of someone named like that.
These are basic examples of informaiton that can be obtained with the "time" factor of the Google logs. Remember that time gives another dimension to your data, which lets you extract more information from it. Something among tht lines of image-pattern recognition, it is easier to match patterns from a moving image than from a static image.
Let's review some notably successful attacks and see if we can learn something...
There is an awful lot of effort being expended protecting us from complex high-tech attacks, when the demonstrated pattern has been for Al Qaeda to use relatively low-tech methods and strike at targets that are easy to hit and achieve significant headlines. If we should learn anything from this, it is that Al Qaeda spends its terrorist money well, getting maximum effect for a minimum of resource.
What we need is more thought and less hasty action, so that we too, might be capable of effective action in return. Pointless blustering actions like this, intended to reassure the public and sustain existing administrations' terms in office, do more to aide and abet the enemy than to frustrate them. We need reason and logic as our allies, instead of keeping them locked in the basement.
The risks still add up, even when you use this machine:
So, you end up putting a lot of money into doing something that will help very few flights, incovenience a large total number of innocent people, and possibly not protect the public at all.
Knoppix is a linux distroy anyone can use, the automated hardware detection etc is supurb. The DVD 4.0 version does demonstrate a lot of the incompatability issues he's talking about though. because knoppix has about 6 GB of applications (they're compressed on the DVD image) many of the applications are broken.
Debian is the distro Knoppix is based of of, so it has really good hardware detection, but the "stable" version is using the "older" proven stable detection routines. That means it doesn't configure everything perfectly; for instance I had to enable DMA on my DVD-ROM, and I had to use k3b to "configure the system" for CD/DVD burning.
I also have the advantage of having prior experience, So I know how to install Flash support for my secondary browser, and how to configure Java (which isn't included in Debian because it's not FOSS). I knew that the FOSS drivers suck compared to the proprietary ones, so I knew where to find them, and I knew what settings to set in the "install" script for them, because I've been messing around with X11 config files for years now!
So basically, initial set up is probably beyond most users, but the same is true of Windows XP. Most Windows users can't even install applications by themselves, and when they try to the end up with a million spyware programs.
Debian is "ready" for the desktop: the installer is painless for geeks, and simple enough for rice boys. A few noobs might even get lucky with it. The stable version while old, has a very simple gui based app finder that anyone who can use Download.com can learn how to use.
Quite simply, Intel no longer uses CISC. Sure, the instruction set is CISC, but it's all microcode reduced to RISC instructions underneath the hood (which was done way back with the Pentium II and may have partially been implemented on the original Pentium). MMX has been dead for a while, replaced by SIMD and SIMD2, which can actually run in parallel to the floating point unit and no longer requires a context switch. Seriously though, outside of the math world, you probably don't need either unless you're doing software rendering of graphics -- the original reason for MMX was to speed up processing of games and video effects in software and this work is now pretty much entirely handled by the GPU.
C'mon, at least Intel is trying. We can't divide 1 by 3 with our base-10 system and our society has yet to crumble. If you want more precision, just use more bits. I'm sure you can figure it out -- after all, you're better than Intel!
Who needs posters? In memoriam James Doohan. The longest surviving "Red Shirt" on the USS Enterprise, his "Scotty" set the standard for generations of geeks and engineers. Working with the latest future technologies, often experimental, under a demanding boss for whom FTL travel, teleporters, galactic communications and more firepower than all of 20th Century Earth combined weren't enough to cakewalk through missions on any given week, Scotty's role model has influenced millions of 20th Century predecessors. His ingenuity, fortitude, and sense of humor while telling the boss that his demands are insane, but doable, even under excruciating time pressure floating around a newly discovered dimension, are an inspiration to us all. Mr. Doohan, in your new journey, go as boldly as you led us in all your merely astral journeys on our televisions, and in our imaginations.
Anyway, isn't this a 4chan fad? What's next, posting YTMND sites on Slashdot's front page?
So, instead of sending your search results to Google to be recorded, you're sending them to both Google and some unknown third-party?
Explain to me how giving some stranger all your search results will protect your privacy, Slashdot.
- Being able to persecute minority religions (prior to the ACLU it was actually illegal to be of the wrong religion in many places).
- Outlawing abortion.
- Eliminating enviromental legislation.
- Keeping black people from voting.
etc...Of course, few strict constructionist judges ever notice that the war on drugs is clearly unconstitutional too.
A lot of the whining revolves around the obligatory "here goes the government again" comments.
Perhaps I'm a bit naïve, but it seems obvious to me that jumping on some website hosted in some third-world country and giving them my credit card so I can play poker through some system controlled by the website against God-knows-who just seems like an invitation to get ripped off.
I'm just not surprised in the least bit to hear some online gambling site shut down or involved parties being arrested for fraud or whatever. Frankly, I'm surprised it's taken this long for some government somewhere to actually look at these sites and realize that there is no way at all to stop the owners thereof from ripping off customers coming and going (aside from the massive amounts of money they make simply from the actual gambling itself).
I've got one of the smallest lists of "things I love that our government has its fingers in," but you should also realize that along with the money the government collects around legalized gambling in the U.S., they also regulate it massivly and crack down fast and hard on places that are ripping people off (above the fact that gambling itself is a ripoff).
Australia has a VERY vibrant gambling scene. There are areas of the country where people pile most of their monthly salary into slot machines (which they call "pokies"). Australia has one of the highest concentration of poker machines in the world, and a high percentage of gambling addicts per capita.
Australia isn't interested in banning gambling as it brings in so much money. They just want to ban online gambling, as the money is likely to leave the country and not get taxed by the Australian government! This is protectionism, not some moral judgement on the part of the Australian government.
I wonder how long it'll be till Bush passes a law so that non-US companies can no longer advertise to US customers. It'll stop money leaving the US economy after all, and reduce the gaping trade deficit.