Contents

1. A GNU/Linux Distro Needing Windows To Install?
2. Consumers May Find Smart Appliances a Dumb Idea
3. Early Abort of Ares I Rocket Would Kill Crew
4. Security Threats 3 Levels Beyond Kernel Rootkits
5. Brazil Demands Repatriation of UK Hazardous Waste
6. Of Science and Choice In Online Dating
7. We Were Smarter About Copyright Law 100 Years Ago
8. Publishers Pressuring MS To Push Indies From Xbox Live?
9. Online Forum Leads To Hostile Workplace Lawsuit
10. Red Hat Is Now Part of the S&P 500
11. Verizon Offers Compromise In Exclusivity Debate
12. The Hidden Costs of Microsoft’s Free Office Online
13. New Linux Kernel Flaw Allows Null Pointer Exploits
14. The NSA Wiretapping Story Nobody Wanted
15. UK Police Raid Party After Seeing “All-Night” Tag On Facebook
16. Beyond the X-PRIZE — a $1.5B Commercial Lunar Market
17. BioShock Creator Levine Teases Next Project

Which motherboard was it? - by bogaboga (Score: 2) Thread

I would like to know which motherboard you’re talking about so that I can avoid this nonsense…and here’s why: -

Doesn’t this state of matters boarder on the brink of insanity?

Re:Which motherboard was it? - by Lehk228 (Score: 2) Thread
Doesn’t this state of matters boarder on the brink of insanity? No, it really doesn’t. Don’t get so hysterical.

Bad Article. Poster didn’t bother to RTFA. - by LurkerXXX (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

The poster of the story didn’t even bother to read the link he provided… You can install it from a USB drive from the source. Asus simply doesn’t provide that installer on their install CD.

This is a non-story. The distro doesn’t need windows to install. The distributor was just being cheap.

Port the code then - by eggman9713 (Score: 4, Informative) Thread
I’m sure quickly enough someone will port it to be installable without Windows. I’m sure it was meant to be for the typical user who has windows installed first, and just wants the instant on one for when they just need the browser quickly and the computer is not on. Someone, anti-MS or not, will port it, I’m sure. Isn’t open source great?

give me a break - by Sir_Lewk (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Second, if distributing GPL’ed software by means that completely preclude it from being used without Windows is not a violation of the GPL, should it not be?

No. Stop being absurd. There are plenty examples of GPLd programs meant only for windows. While this might be a little silly in this case there is nothing “wrong” with it and you need to stop getting so upset about it.

It’s not about money savings, it’s about rationing - by PugPappa (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
As far as I can see, this whole smart-grid concept is being sold as a money saving move when it’s really about convincing the citizenry to freely accept rationing, even ask for it. The whole basis for the smart-grid is the notion that we cannot or more correctly, should not generate more electricity. If this is allowed to continue, we will all be forced to accept a lower standard of living.

While I am all for green energy, save the Planet - by Orion Blastar (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

etc, I don’t want it done via taking away rights and freedoms and forcing people to not use electronic devices until off-peak hours. I also don’t want it done in a way, like cap and trade, that makes energy use so expensive that it costs jobs and forces poor people to go without electricity.

This “Smart Grid” has a way of spying on a home owners (or renters) privacy as well as shutting off devices so that they cannot use them until off-peak hours. Can you imagine your washing and drier being shut off, and you need to get three loads of clothes done, and you are forced to wear dirty clothes until the washer and drier can be turned back on. Not only that but sweating it out during the summer when the A/C is turned off by the grid and possibly dying of heat stroke and freezing to death in the winter when the heater is forced off until it turns back on during non-peak hours. I got a feeling there will be a lot of death by the smart grid lawsuits if this thing passes.

Re:While I am all for green energy, save the Plane - by horatio (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Exactly. I don’t want the power company, or the government, controlling when and how I use appliances in my house. MY house, MY appliances. STAY OUT. Smart-meter my ass.

Dumb - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

Smart appliances are a truly dumb idea. What things in your home consume the most power?

Tier 1 
Refrigerator. 
Stove/Oven/Microwave. 
Heating/Cooling. 
Dishwasher. 
Dryer.

Tier 2 
Lighting 
Entertainment system. 
Hair dryer etc.

Can you wait for off-peak power for any of those? Of those things, what can really be delayed?

The fridge? Not if you dont want you food to spoil. 
Stove/Oven. Not if you want to have dinner. 
Heating/Cooling. Not if you want to be in your house while you are awake. 
Dishwasher. Yes. That one. 
Dryer. Maybe, if you are okay with wet clothes sitting around (mold). Not if you have more than one load. 
Lighting Not if you want to be in your house while you are awake. 
Entertainment system. Not if you want to actually use it. 
Hair dryer? No, that’s not how it works.

So there was what? Just the dishwasher?

This whole idea sounds like some dumb-ass’ PhD topic. Fascinating in theory, doesn’t work in reality.

How long will peak rates be around for? - by DigitAl56K (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

As a single guy (rare for Slashdot, I know..) I don’t use much energy at home during the day because surprise surprise I’m out at work. On the other hand, I’m sure there are many people who have families where one adult is home part of the day and probably takes care of cleaning, laundry, etc. during that time, probably watches TV and/or uses the computer, has kids to entertain, needs air conditioning in the summer, heating in the winter, etc. It doesn’t seem like smart electronics are going to substantially change these behaviors. Great, the dryer wants to wait until off-peak to dry my clothes, but I have 3 loads of laundry to get done..

What may change things is something that we’ve discussed here several times: Electric cars that have the ability to return electricity to the grid during times of high demand. Hopefully this or other means of localized power storage will reduce the need for “peak” pricing in future. Hopefully devices will also consume less power in future. For example, if you’re spending time online with your notebook you aren’t drawing anywhere near the 100-200w you would if you were using a desktop system (my Eee 1000HE netbook draws 9-12 watts).

I would rather see us find ways to better match power availability to demand instead of a short-lived period of doing the inverse. Electric cars are a great way to do so because it’s a natural leverage of developments in our lives that are already taking place with widespread support.

Maybe it’s just an occupational hazard. - by Shag (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Here’s the straight-talk version:

“Welcome to NASA. We’re going to send you into space, but this involves sitting you atop something that’s basically a big stick of explosives. We’re aiming for a controlled burn, and most of the time we get that part right, but as you’re probably aware, every now and then something does blow the heck up.

Now, as you might imagine, if you are sitting atop a big stick of explosives, and it blows the heck up, you probably go with it. We’re going to try to give you some kind of an out so that the explosives can blow up without you doing the same, but we want you to know it’s not really going to make your odds all that much better.”

I mean, seriously, folks. People don’t sign up to be astronauts without grasping that there’s a very real risk of death at pretty much every point in the mission.

Risk? - by Runaway1956 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

How much risk is acceptable? Is the Air Force suggesting that space exloration should be 0% risk, or less?

If so, then we should probably ground all aircraft, scrap all automobiles - you get the idea.

Let’s face it. Sitting on top of tons of explosive, and lighting them off, is going to be risky. Minimize the risk, yeah, but there will always BE RISK. It doesn’t matter what kind of engine you are using, or what kind of fuel it is using. A crash within the first minute of flight is often quite deadly in aviation simply because the pilot has so few options for ditching or bailing out. The same will always be true of spaceflight.

If we want 0% risk, we had better get started on that space elevator. Of course, there may be some hidden risk at some point in that ascent - but at least we won’t be blowing it up to use it.

Re:Risk? - by Entropius (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The Air Force doesn’t seem to be making a moral judgment.

They’re doing what any good scientist or engineer will do: “If you do this, this will happen. I’m not telling you what you *should* do, but simply what will happen if you do it.”

More Broadly… - by fuzzyfuzzyfungus (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
The specifics of this issue aside(since I know next to nothing about modeling solid fuel rocket explosions, and two experts appear to disagree, along with a snide comment from a commercial outfit that would probably like the contract for themselves), what sort of safety should we bother shooting for with launch systems? 
 
Obviously, if we have the choice between a more safe and a less safe system we should, all else being equal, chose the more safe one. However, all else is rarely equal. More safety likely adds weight, design time, cost, whatever. How much safety is worth adding, before we get to the “For fuck’s sake, dude, garbage collectors die on the job at twice the rate, and being crushed in a dumpster isn’t exactly a blaze of glory…” point and live with the risks? 
 
Is there some direct assertion to be made(astronauts should suffer no more than X risk, period)? Should we take an empirical look at the risks of various occupations, and peg the acceptable astronaut risk as equal to that of some similar occupation for which an empirical actual risk value is available? Should we accept very high risks; because astronauts are highly likely to be well informed volunteers who have plenty of life alternatives? 
 
Pushing for perfect is chasing a dream. Deciding what we should be aiming for seems much more relevant.

Re:The Air Force is right. - by Entropius (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I worked at Marshall Space Flight Center — the facility where the Ares is being developed — for a while as part of an undergrad summer research project. While it may not be polite to say such things, AC’s criticism of NASA’s affirmative action policies is spot on.

My boss and his officemate were both affirmative action hires. My boss couldn’t remember his computer password and called IT every time he crashed WinNT and needed to reboot. His officemate just put his on a stickynote on his monitor. When he got a new computer he had to get me (an undergrad) to make him a desktop shortcut to Solitaire. I have no idea what that guy did other than order office supplies.

My boss often skipped work to play golf, leaving me in charge of the lab. I wound up growing samples in a gas deposition chamber and giving them to him to catalog and characterize. At one point I asked him how the characterization was going, and he said that the Raman spectroscopy lab was buried under a backlog of debris from Columbia (which was earlier that year). At the end of the summer I had a chat with *his* boss, who told me that there was no such backlog… and then we found all the samples I had painstakingly grown and labelled lying jumbled in the bottom of a drawer of his.

While it makes me sad to say it, I’ve seen Marshall Space Flight Center incompetence with my own eyes. I’m from Huntsville, the city where MSFC is located. When I was growing up Real Science got done there — my high school English teacher is the guy who built the Lunar Rover. But it’s gone downhill.

I also know the guy who’s in charge of systems integration for the Ares project. He’s a young-earth creationist. I have little faith in the engineering acumen of anyone who can accomplish such a massive feat of ignoring experimental evidence.

Re:Better solution: read only media - by Enleth (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Been there, done that, works great.

A few years ago, I set up a bunch of thin clients for general browsing, chatting and homework at a school dorm - they were (were, as I have no idea if they’re still in use, but they were absolutely maintenance-free, so I guess they should be) running Linux, with the kernel and boot config (generated on the fly) loaded from a read-only TFTP server and / mounted from a read-only NFS share. On each boot, the init scripts would finish generating a machine-specific configuration in /etc/ and mount a few ramfses on top of some directories using unionfs to give an illusion of a read-write filesystem. Then, upon login (LDAP authentication), the user’s directory would be mounted from an individual password-protected Samba share (accessible from the users’ personal computers as well), with the noexec attrubite of course. /tmp/ and /var/ were also noexec. Upgrades to the client system were performed at the server, by chrooting into the exported root directory.

Such a configuration is absolutely invulnerable to users, rootkits, viruses and any other riffraff known for breaking things in computers. Even in the unlikely event that someone gained root privileges on a client, they would actually gain nothing and even that nothing would vanish after a reboot.

Why? - by rysiek (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

”…interview with security expert Joanna Rutkowska (which is unfortunately split over 9 pages)”

Why oh why did they split Joanna into 9 pages?! Thats so cruel!

Also, First Post

Well… - by afabbro (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

And in the article:

And as long as your bank is never hacked and serving up malware, that probably works well…

Re:Well… - by mlts (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

This is something I’m wondering. Perhaps the best thing would be for the “Red” machine to be completely rolled back when done using, and have a virtual share mapped for any data that is worth saving.

Re:Well… - by lagfest (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Already exists for windows: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/sharedaccess/default.mspx

And it’s free.

Black Puddings - by wjh31 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
When comming from supermarkets, i believe the correct term for a bag of blood is a black pudding.

Could be worse. - by bobdotorg (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I hear that the Port of Buenos Aires was sent 31 shipping containers of British food.

Re:Could be worse. - by bobdotorg (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Brits eat waste?

Yes. Although they sometimes call it pudding.

Re:Could be worse. - by dkleinsc (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Reminds me of the old saw: 
Heaven - Where the police are British, the lovers Italian, the chefs French, the cars German, all organized by the Swiss. 
Hell - Where the police are German, the lovers Swiss, the chefs British, the cars French, all organized by the Italians.

Wow. Truth really IS so much stranger than fiction - by Datamonstar (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
Douglas Adams himself would have a difficult time thinking up something so blunderingly, amazingly stupid and steeped in political dumb-fuckery. I find myself compelled, forced even, to complete a piece of fan fiction regarding a massive garbage freighter being sent repeatedly back and forth between two planets like a giant, stinky and half-rotten tennis ball because two governments couldn’t get it straight which one of them tossed out the first banana peel. I think it has merit.

Re:Science, lol? - by radtea (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Do people even know what they want from a partner?

Yeah, they do. 99.9% of women want “a good man who loves to laugh and is fun and just an ordinary guy.”

I’m a divorced man in a small (~100,000) town and have used online dating sites off-and-on for about five years—mostly Plenty Of Fish, but also LavaLife and OkCupid. I’ve met two absolutely wonderful women this way—both of whom were so wonderful that after a year or three with me their careers took them off to bigger, far-distant centres, although in both cases we’re still friends.

I’ve also met the biggest collection of flakes, losers, liars, bores and nutjobs you could possibly imagine, and I am currently ready to slap anyone whose entire self-description is, “I love to laugh, like long walks on the beach and am just looking for an ordinary guy.”

Seriously, have you ever met anyone anywhere who doesn’t like to laugh? It’s what we laugh at that’s interesting, and hardly anyone ever says what that is.

The trick for all these sites is to weed out the common things that everyone has, and to reduce people who have zero self-awareness to abject silence until they come up with sufficient self-knowledge to say something about themselves that isn’t woefully banal. OkCupid’s system of questions does that, although I can think of some simple improvements that would make it better.

The key thing is to focus on the concrete. There should be very nearly zero abstraction in any of the information gathered from users, and the site should then generate the abstract categories the user is assigned to based on that information.

For example, don’t ask people what their “body type” is (abstract category) but what their height and weight are, how fast they can run or walk a mile, how many miles they run or walk each week, when was the last time they walked more than a mile, or biked more than a five miles, or swam more than 500 m, and so on. Then generate the abstract category for them: “couch potato”, “morbidly obese”, etc, rather than letting users define “athletic” or “slim” or “average” any way they want to (I’ve seen morbidly obese people, who have posted pictures of themselves, categorize themselves as “average”.)

Mostly, these sites are selling fantasies to liars (women) and idiots (men), so doing anything that would provide more accurate information about what differentiates one person from another is counter-productive relative to their business model. The few honest, intelligent people out there have to wade through a huge amount of dross to find each other. Fortunately, that is still possible, and despite their flaws these sites remain a sensible component of anyone’s search for companionship. Just be prepared to do a lot of filtering by hand.

“twice as many women…” until now! - by whoever57 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

The site has had twice as many women (by percentage) sign up as the other dating sites typically see.

A new meaning was given to the term “slashdot effect” today, as hordes of /. readers register on the site, changing its demographics to be similar to other dating sites.

There’s also okcupid - by Colin Smith (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Run by a couple of maths grads. Last time I looked they were using a regression analysis to match people.

The site’s also free.

Re:It’s the number of zeros that matter - by johnlcallaway (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
I was approached by one of those dating services 6 years ago to ‘just come in and talk’. So I used it as a chance to hone my negotiating skills and went in. I found some nice ladies that had me fill out some forms, then explain how great their service was. They told me how nice it was to have a ‘nice guy’ come in, by which I think they meant someone polite, considerate, and well employed. They told me that they only accept employed people without criminal backgrounds.  
 
Then they told me it costs $3,500. I almost laughed at them and suggested that that was a little high just to meet someone. They then went through the schpeal about how they do all these checks and everything. I still said it was too much. They came down in price. Still too much.  
 
Finally, they asked me how much I thought it was worth. I told them that I’d pay $500. At which time they concluded my interview.  
 
I left that day with the thought that if there truly were more women than men in this service, it’s only because men won’t spend $3,500 to meet women because they don’t need to.  
 
Three years later I rediscovered an old high school friend and sent her a ‘Hello!! How ya doing??’ email with no intention of dating. We sent a few emails, started calling, flew 2,000 miles to visit several times, and got married 10 months later. And joked that we never had a real date because we already knew each other and had never dated in high school.  
 
2 1/2 years later later we are still very happy together, have sex regularly, and enjoy being with each other. Worked better than my first marriage by a long shot.  
 
Maybe people should just stop dating and learn how to experience life and just get out and do things. My friends that try the hardest to meet someone are the ones that are the least successful at it.

Easy for you to say - by StarKruzr (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Maybe people should just stop dating and learn how to experience life and just get out and do things. My friends that try the hardest to meet someone are the ones that are the least successful at it.

This is a very facile thing for someone in your position to say. For many of the rest of us “experiencing life” all by itself simply means interminable years of crushing loneliness.

I have started to come to the following realization:

Happiness is guaranteed to no one. The best one can expect out of life is that you can always find some way to respect yourself and say “I did something with my life that I can look myself in the mirror and approve of.” That status of self-respect is prerequisite for happiness, but it is by no means a guarantor. There is every chance that you’ll just get out there and do your thing and live your life and be alone and lonely right up until the day you die.

100 years ago… - by Techmeology (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
100 years ago, we did not have the technology to replicate information as we do now. Hence there was little public demand to be able to do so. Today it is different. A law so rejected by the people is doomed to failure (Prohibition in America in the 1920s anyone?). Copyright law if far too draconian - so much so that many people violate it without realizing it, and many others deliberately do so out of apathy.

Re:Was Copyright or Technology Better Understood? - by meringuoid (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Nobody knows how Communism would have turned out if it had a more benevolent dictator than Stalin.

If Stalin had been replaced by some humane Communist who wasn’t prepared to liquidate millions of kulaks in the cause of collectivising Soviet agriculture and freeing up labour for industrial work in the cities building tanks, well… I have a funny feeling that quite a lot of us would be speaking German today.

Mind you, if he’d been replaced by some moderate Communist who wasn’t monumentally gullible and who actually read Mein Kampf before signing treaties with Hitler, then the Soviets might have been better prepared for a fight in the first place.

They don’t even go back far enough. - by symbolset (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

- Thomas McCauley on copyright, 1841.

Re:They don’t even go back far enough. - by girlintraining (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

That’s a lot of words to say this: Go too far and the public will stop respecting the law(s).

Re:They don’t even go back far enough. - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
(+6, Thread over)

It took 160 years, but everything he said came true.

Thank you everyone who made this possible - by pizzach (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Looks like game developers have finally grown big enough to start considering building their own RIAA/MPAA. I just want to say thanks to the people who only buy games that they have heard of through commercials of or only buy sequels. I also want to thank the graphics whores who only support games that a mega company could afford to make. Without you guys, none of this would be possible. (This also counts for presidential elections etc…)

I knew it - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
MS are the reason Firefly was canceled.

It’s a CONSPIRACY! Or… not. - by girlintraining (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Umm, guys? Indie titles get crapped on because they’re small, not because of some conspiracy. Large businesses simply don’t want to expend the resources and time to make things available for the “little guys”, because the net return is so much lower. I mean, hey — if I can corner 90% of the market by setting up my distribution platform to, say, seven businesses, why should I make that same effort fifty or a hundred times more just to get that extra 10%? I think, if I were in that position, I’d just move on to the next thing and save my money. And yes, it’s all electronic. That doesn’t make it zero-cost; There’s administrative costs to everything and those costs don’t go up in a linear fashion as you add more members.

Re:It’s a CONSPIRACY! Or… not. - by gandhi_2 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

xbl has done a pretty good job of streamlining the indie-game process. They’ve made it simple enough that allowing indie-devs to publish games equates to almost NO EXTRA WORK on the part of MS. Which is smart.

Of course there are admin costs, but dev fees and sales quite handily make up for that. The fact is, putting a limit on the number of indie games is an active act, requiring work. The end result can only have lead to lower indie sales.

I agree with you that some people look for the conspiracy everywhere, but in this case MS took an action that would lead to less indie sales. I can only think that was in response to some external stimuli (major game publishers).

Re:It’s a CONSPIRACY! Or… not. - by drinkypoo (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I feel like you’ve missed the mark substantially. The problem isn’t with the idea that these are conspiracy theories, but with the idea that a conspiracy theory is automatically flawed. In reality, any time two people get together to bone at least one other person out of something, it’s a conspiracy.

Don’t attack the idea that Microsoft’s plans for world domination are conspiracy theories; that is precisely what they are. However, they are also well-founded.

It would not surprise me at all if Microsoft were deliberately throttling game submissions to serve first-string developers. The most successful indie developers will have the opportunity to be sucked up into the system that pays Microsoft a fat licensing fee for every title sold. Microsoft isn’t in business to help indie gaming, they’re in business to make a profit. The indie games available on Live are only there so long as they support the bottom line in some way.

I can relate to that… - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread
I can relate to that and I’m not even black. I was born in Africa and got my first job in North America as a ‘Token Black’. My new employer was rather surprised to see that I was white. Since then, I have on numerous occasions been turned down for a job as soon as the employer learned that I was born in Africa. When I mentioned to a friend that being an African American White causes trouble while job hunting, he said that I have nothing to complain about, since he is an African American White Jew… The only solution to American racism is to start your own company.

Fire their asses. Simple as that. - by EWAdams (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

You’re allowed to hold any idiot opinion you want in the USA. You are not allowed to express it on the job. Workplace harmony trumps freedom to be an asshole. This was settled long ago; it’s a dead issue. It goes double for cops, who need both to be sensitive to the public AND to have the full confidence and support of their fellow officers.

Don’t like it? Go be a cop in Saudi, where I’m sure you’re allowed to be as racist as you like.

Seems pretty obvious - by MikeBabcock (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

If a man goes to a private website like say, Playboy in private and then discusses it in front of female co-workers, they may be charged with harassment. Guess what, just because its a private website, magazine, or bar doesn’t mean you should repeat those thoughts or experiences or stories in front of your co-workers who could most obviously be offended.

Cry me a river - by WiiVault (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
While it is certainly in bad taste to have officers voicing these opinions on a forum, what is even more absurd is the lack of integrity of these lawyers to file such an insane lawsuit. Was anything illegal even committed? Also worth noting that these same lawyers are tacking the “pool kids” case. I can’t help but think that perhaps that story is a similar pile of “I’m a victim” bullshit. Its sad when people abuse race, because it leads to distrust of those who are actually being discriminated against and need help.

The Solution Here - by fragmentate (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

A lot of people misinterpret what “freedom of expression” means.

People believe they have the write to “express” themselves as they please in the workplace. That simply isn’t the case. Our rights — our freedoms — are protected against government interference not private interference. Your employer — even a government office — can silence you. There are laws for the workplace that take precedence over your rights. The law protects employees against being discriminated against or being harassed because of their ethnicity, religious beliefs, disabilities, sexual orientation, and gender. Those aren’t rights, however. You don’t have a right not to be harassed. You are protected by laws.

Quite simply, these officers are out of line, and have broken laws. They don’t have a choice but to change their behavior. If they want to frequent this site from home in their private time that is when their right to express themselves is enforceable. However, we all know there are consequences to actions in our private lives as well. But trying to make people behave to serve their best-interest is just a futile effort at protecting “stupid.”

The comments about this story are already ridiculous (search news.google.com, and blogs.google.com). Everyone thinks they know their rights, but I can tell by the comments none really know what their rights are, or what a right is.

CIT and moral hazard - by benjfowler (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Congrats on Red Hat reaching the big league. I’ve got a couple of mates who work for Red Hat, and they say business is booming in the downturn, because they’re picking up a lot of business from people looking to save money through Red Hat’s Open Source-plus-support way of doing things. I wish Red Hat luck.

Sadly, this doesn’t seem to have been the case with CIT, whose criminally incompetent management decided that letting the Government bail them out, was a better business plan than running their business as a going concern.

Too bad Anglo-American culture is far too tolerant of failure, particularly in the business world. The fat cats need to be taken down a few pegs — and serious repercussions for failure are needed.

The big problem with the government bailouts on both sides of the pond, is that the captains of industry are scum, by and large; and will find a way to be “too big to fail”, and profit by bludging off people who pay their taxes and do the right thing. Thankfully, the chaps in charge in the US have let CIT fail. After all, private business are full of people who preach the benefits of free markets in the good times. The Obama administration are wise enough to allow them to be destroyed by the remorseless logic of the free market when they are too weak to survive.

de-spin - by girlintraining (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

First, the S&P members are selected by committee, not by merit alone. Companies are (usually) included because they have a high liquidity and are “representative” of their industry. Not that Red Hat being selected isn’t good news, just understand they’re not selecting it because of the “runaway success of Linux”, but because Red Hat is representative of the overall health of this segment of the industry.

Re:de-spin - by morgan_greywolf (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

For Red Hat to be representative of their industry, they need to be a healthy and profitable company. While I agree that this doesn’t necessarily point to Linux as a being a “runaway success”, it is significant to note that Red Hat’s flagship product is a distribution of Linux and the various open source tools from GNU, X.org, Gnome, X.org, etc, and that their other products that help to boost their profitable, like JBoss are also open source tools. So yeah, it’s a big win for open source because it shows that you can make it to the S&P 500 by being an open source company. That puts things in proper perspective.

Index funds - by andhar (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Inclusion in the S&P 500 could mean some index funds will have to acquire some shares. Inclusion in an index is usually seen as positive, and falling out of an index is seen as negative, when index funds have to sell.

Re:Index funds - by tnk1 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Yes and no. Directly, no effect on Red Hat.

Indirectly, Red Hat probably has a stock reserve that it maintains. Improving the price of their stock means that they can actually buy things with that stock, usually this is in the form of acquisitions. Many buyouts are done in the form of stock swaps.

Additionally, it makes their stock more attractive to give to employees/executives because its not some fly-by-night operation any more. Not that it was before, but some people like their certifications and industry recognitions.

In the end, it could potentially have a net positive effect on Linux, particularly if they use any advantage in a way that will help Linux, either directly or incidentally via side-effects of their corporate strategy.

A lot of what-ifs, but in the end, its nice to put a capstone on Linux success in the business world.

The arugment - by FlyingGuy (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

All of the wireless carriers, when you boil it down, offer the same thing, dial tone over a radio.

At some point, in any competitive environment you have to be able to differentiate yourself from the other carrier, so really what are the options?

• Coverage? Well that one is a pretty level playing field. Yes any one carrier can expand their coverage by putting up more cell towers, but most of the metro area’s have pretty decent coverage and trying to improve that can be daunting. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area and I can tell that trying to put up a cell tower in the City of San Francisco is a at best a 3 year process from birth of the idea to taking the cell live.
• Price, at some point that becomes a non-issue. In the SF Bay Area you can can get a cell phone with unlimited calling in the SF Bay Area for $35.00 a month with Metro-PCS
• Features, well thats a horse of a different color since features basically come down to bandwidth capacity.
• Cool Factor. This is where the handset makes the difference, and the central point of carrier lock-in

With all of those factors except the cool factor being pretty much equal this is how they differentiate themselves from the next carrier. They go to the handset manufacturers and ask, “Hey what do you have that is really cool?”, the look at whats out their and evaluate it and then pick the best platform that will allow them to create the best combination of experiences that add up to the all important cool factor.

Lest anyone be confused, the carriers invest a LOT of money in brining this handset to market and its is not like they make a lot of money on the handsent. They make the money on the service they provide be it providing higher bandwidth, storage services, fancy voice mail or whatever.

It is their money they are spending to do all of this, and the notion of creating a network that lets all this cool factor happen just to have someone else duplicate it, or worse duplicate it badly and sell at a lower price point is NOT a winning business model, in fact it is a model for going out of business.

NO COMPROMISE ON THIS - by erroneus (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

It simply can’t be allowed. What we need is the exact same deal that exists for POTS. The phone company pulled nearly the same crap with phones years ago until the government stepped in and said “no more!” In this day where people are increasingly dumping POTS for mobile phone services, it won’t be long before we’re trapped in the same situation. The time for action is now rather than later… truly, the time for action was at least 10 years ago.

As it stands, phone makers have a technological means of restriction in that AT&T and T-Mobile operate on GPRS while Sprint and Verizon operate on CDMA. But really, those could be pluggable modules installable at manufacture time. Not sure that would be terribly hard to overcome.

But when handsets are “free” (as in freedom) I think we will see not only a drop in prices of the phones but also of services. The control of phone prices and availability by the carriers has raised prices, nearly eliminated the used handset market, has essentially prevented a 3rd party phone market and created a disincentive for people to change carriers because they know it means buying another new expensive phone. This is a rather perfect example of anticompetitive behavior that should make Bill Gates envious.

Re:Understandable - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

“but Verizon does make a valid point.”

No they don’t. They along with other mobile providers in the US are among the very few carriers of any sort of consumer service in the world that enjoy this sort of exclusivity.

This shit wouldn’t fly if you could only use Samsung TVs on Comcast. Nor would it fly if Earthlink required you to use a Dell computer to access their dialup service.

Re:Hmm - by rsmith-mac (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

How many carriers are under 500,000 in the states?

None that own their own networks, which I suspect is the the other half of the point. Letting their vassals have their “exclusive” phones doesn’t really change anything for Verizon.

Re:continued crappy service & coverage - by tomz16 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

DING DING DING DING… There’s your problem! GSM service in North America is a complete joke in my experience. ESPECIALLY once you venture out of any major city or highway! Just look at the coverage maps for each carrier!

I’ve had both a CDMA and GSM work phone for many years. Traveled through much of the US. I always chuckle when I see some reviewer favorably comparing the two, ESPECIALLY on coverage.

I was actually up in Maine (Bangor and Bar Harbor) just last week. I had my personal verizon phone with me, and a GSM work phone. The GSM phone had a t-mobile sim but all of the carriers seem to mutually roam in Maine. The phone could associate with banner (company) : Cingular (AT&T), US-890 (Unicel), and T-mobile (T-mobile). It autoregistered to any one of those networks depending on the strongest signal. All THREE of those GSM networks combined were completely dwarfed by Verizon’s native CDMA coverage. I mean it wasn’t even remotely close! Hell, I had full EVDO revA coverage in areas that couldn’t even get a regular GSM/GPRS signal.

In my experience, GSM in Canada is no different. For example, I continued up to Cape Breton after Maine. At one point, the closest GSM tower (Rogers) was a hundred miles away! Full CDMA coverage almost all the way up there, and many spots with EVDO!

So… In my opinion, the easiest way fix to your problem with coverage in the boonies is to go visit a verizon store, and just bite the bullet on the BS craptacular locked-down handset they will give you. At least you’ll be able to use your phone to… you know… make phone calls…

Glad to be off that treadmill - by HangingChad (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

A Microsoft spokesperson told me that customers will need to buy a SharePoint server, which ranges from $4,400 plus CALs, or $41,000 with all CALs included, if they want to share documents created using the online version of Office 2010.”

I am so happy to be working in an office free of the MS strangle hold. CALs always struck me as the most insidious of their macabre licensing circus. First you pay for the software, then you pay again so people can use it. What a racket. For the $41,000 you’re paying in CALs I can cover an employee salary for 8 months (that would be one of the lower level people).

We don’t have any problems getting our work done at the office without Microsoft. We have corporate Gmail and use GoogleDocs, so far with zero problems. If we have super sekret corporate information we can’t trust to Google, we can store them in the truecrypt file container. We can send out pdf’s to clients and customers, everyone can read them and they format just fine.

Plus I really like that we don’t have to fit either our business processes or development processes to MSFT models. It’s a lot more open and a lot more productive. You don’t realize how much time you spend dancing on Microsoft’s string until you get away from them. And, as an extra bonus, I can blow your ROI and TCO numbers out of the water. Just about any metric you want to use. And I never have to make the painful choice between layoffs and new servers. We can upgrade on our schedule, patch on our schedule, work the way we want to. If we need more capacity, we just stand it up. If we don’t need it we can turn it off and it’s not wasted money sitting there doing nothing.

And it’s not just a small office. If you set it up right, you could do the same thing with almost any size organization. The only consistent pain in the rear problem we have regularly are those damn webinar programs. GoToMeeting and crap like that. Many of those are Windows only. That’s kind of annoying.

Details at Eleven - by thethibs (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Wow! Microsoft is selling its software! Be still my heart!

Google charges too, for corporate Docs accounts - by themeparkphoto (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Google has paid services too with similar pricing models. While there is a free “Google for domains” that gives you docs, etc, on your domain, there are additional paid tiers of support.

Source? - by jamesl (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

And the source of this important information on pricing of an unreleased product? 
A Microsoft spokesperson told me …

Microsoft spokespersons with the knowledge and authority to speak about such things have a name and title.

Re:A Bad Idea - by MightyYar (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Isn’t that kind of a sweeping statement? Might it not be a good idea for some people?

It rather depends what you put on there and what kind of business you are, doesn’t it? It also depends on your backup strategy. If they up the price of their service, you can migrate away. If they shut it off completely with no warning… well, you were keeping backups, right?

Who’s talking about trust? You use their service and you keep backups. You don’t “trust” anyone.

Please tell me that your whole post wasn’t just a plug for a free office suite that everyone on Slashdot is already aware of?

Anyway, other than saving a few hundred bucks per seat, OpenOffice isn’t a “solution”. It still requires more support compared to letting Google/MS be your IT department.

Wait, what? - by TheRaven64 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
This code looks right?

struct sock *sk = tun->sk; // initialize sk with tun->sk 
… 
if (!tun) 
return POLLERR; // if tun is NULL return error

So, he’s dereferencing tun, and then checking if tun was NULL? Looks like the compiler is performing an incorrect optimisation if it’s removing the test, but it’s still horribly bad style. This ought to be crashing at the sk = tun->sk line, because the structure is smaller than a page, and page 0 is mapped no-access (I assume Linux does this; it’s been standard practice in most operating systems for a couple of decades to protect against NULL-pointer dereferencing). Technically, however, the C standard allows tun->sk to be a valid address, so removing the test is a semantically-invalid optimisation. In practice, it’s safe for any structure smaller than a page, because the code should crash before reaching the test.

So, we have bad code in Linux and bad code in GCC, combining to make this a true GNU/Linux vulnerability.

Re:Wait, what? - by pdh11 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Technically, however, the C standard allows tun->sk to be a valid address, so removing the test is a semantically-invalid optimisation.

No. Technically, if tun is null, dereferencing it in the expression tun->sk invokes undefined behaviour — not implementation-defined behaviour. It is perfectly valid to remove the test, because no strictly conforming code could tell the difference — the game is already over once you’ve dereferenced a null pointer. This is a kernel bug (and not even, as Brad Spengler appears to be claiming, a new class of kernel bug); it’s not a GCC bug.

But as other posters have said, it would indeed be a good security feature for GCC to warn when it does this.

Peter

Re:Wait, what? - by johnw (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Which must be either “0” or ”(void *) 0”.

Not true - the standard requires NULL to be defined as one of the two values given above.

There are indeed some platforms where a null pointer is not an all-bits-zero value, but this is achieved by compiler magic behind the scenes. It is still created by assigning the constant value 0 to a pointer, and can be checked for by comparing a pointer with a constant 0.

Re:Wait, what? - by TheSunborn (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I think the compiler is correct. If tun is null, then tun->sk is undefined and the compiler can do what even optimization it want.

So when the compiler see tun->sk it can assume that tun is not null, and do the optimization, because IF tun is null, then the program is invoked undefined behavier, which the compiler don’t have to preserve/handle. (How do you keep the semantic of an undefined program??)

Re:Serious bug in gcc? - by Bananenrepublik (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

They were writing nonsense. GCC makes use of the fact that in the C language any pointer that was dereferenced can’t be NULL (this is made explicit in the standard). People use C as a high-level assembly where these assumptions don’t hold. This is why code that doesn’t assume this breaks. This issue came up a few months ago on the GCC lists, where an embedded developer pointed out that he regularly maps memory to the address 0x0, thereby running into issues with this assumption in the optimizers. The GCC developers introduced a command-line flag which tells the computer to not make that assumption, therefore allowing the compiler to be used even in environments where NULL pointers can be valid.

Now, the exploit uses this feature of the compiler (or the C language, if you will) to get the kernel into an unspecified state (which is then exploited) — the NULL pointer check will be “correctly” optimized away. But in order to do this it first has to make sure that the pointer dereference preceding the NULL pointer check doesn’t trap. This needs some mucking around with SELinux, namely one has to map memory to 0x0.

This is a beautiful exploit, which nicely demonstrates how complex interplay between parts can show unforeseen consequences. Linux fixes this by using the aforementioned new compiler option to not have the NULL pointer check optimized away.

‘It’s a paper’s duty to print the news&raise h - by D4C5CE (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Klein: I really was panicking because […] the government knew everything and probably knew my name, but I didn’t have any publicity. 
IDGNS: The media merit a full chapter (entitled: ‘Going Public vs. Media Chickens’). What happened there? 
Klein: […] They were the first entity I’d given all the documents to. Then they talked to the government about it, and it turned out they were talking to not only the NSA director, but the director of national intelligence

That much for the sad state of “the Fourth Estate, more important than them all” (Edmund Burke) …

It is a newspaper’s duty to print the news and raise hell.

Wilbur F. Storey, 1861

of course they didn’t want it - by dnwq (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Think about it this way. The news is public, now. Do you see any frothing outrage, outside of a few fringe activist groups? Outside of Slashdot? No? 
 
There doesn’t seem to be any real interest now, so there definitely wouldn’t be any then, in the with-us-or-against-us environment in the years immediately after 9/11. So how would a newspaper or media outlet gain by breaking the story? It’ll just instantly lose all its government contacts, but not gain any new readership. Why would anyone publish it?

They had no choice “not to want it” - by D4C5CE (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

how would a newspaper or media outlet gain by breaking the story? It’ll just instantly lose all its government contacts, but not gain any new readership

How would it deserve keeping its present government contacts (while putting them to no use, let alone snitching whistleblowers to them!) and readers by holding back The News?! 
(Assuming a residual journalistic ethos defines the latter as more than “just the stuff to fill the space between the ads”, as allegedly a Fleet Street media baron once put it…) 
 
Even with an anti-terror spin (and possibly actual arrests), e.g. of eavesdropping only on the bad guys (and “inevitably” listening in on everyone else in the process as well), the founders considered this issue important enough to merit a Fourth Amendment, which doesn’t leave much leeway (or should we say: “weasel way”?) for a paper (especially with the profession’s self-image of a Fourth Estate as part of democracy’s “checks and balances”) to decide on making it “non-news”.

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.

Henry Louis Mencken

Domestic traffic too - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

From EFF.org

Of course, we may never know all the details thanks to Bush, Obama and all the other assholes that voted for FISA2008:

Re:I question a key point from TFA - by Kreigaffe (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

You’re right on both parts, essentially. I think they also were monitoring calls originating in the US that were made to foreign numbers they believed to have ties with terrorism, too, but honestly it’s hard to really figure out what the truth is and was with so much fear-mongering and hyperbole going on.

Oh, and the program itself wasn’t really new, it’s been around forever. Bush & Co. just tweaked the rules around a little bit — a move that I think was less about invading the privacy of Americans (which they’ve been able to do for several decades now) and more a matter of removing a bottleneck. The whole secret wiretap deal has to be approved by a secret court, I think there’s a 24 or 48 hour window in which they can start a wiretap and then seek approval by this secret court. Well, in the wake of 9/11, they were using this quite a bit, and I’m of the belief that they circumvented the court not because they wanted to be Big Brother but because they knew that most these wiretaps would NOT result in any information but felt that at the time it was best to cast as wide a net as possible, immediately, and later worry about narrowing things down from “possible” to “likely”.

The secret court, of course, only would be able to review so many requests for secret wiretaps at once, and if you’re looking at a list of 1,000 possibles and you think 100 of them are pretty likely, let’s say it would take a week for a court (and you) to go through and decide which of those 1,000 were the ones you wanted.. well, I believe the idea was simply to not worry about the time limit due to the huge volume and keep all the wiretaps in place until some sort of review could be done, rather than potentially miss out on valuable information because of a paperwork bottleneck.

Not that I really care for the idea of secret courts or meetings or wiretaps or anything, but overblown fearmongering and fingerpointing pisses me off even more. Especially when it’s hypocritical fingerpointing. It’s not like the democrats in power were oblivious to what was going on (see also, criticism of the information on WMDs before the Iraq War from the democrats when in fact they had access and agreed with the intelligence reports at the time.. fucking i’ll-have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too bullshit).

It is the LAW people - by SmallFurryCreature (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

You see a lot of kiddies complaining along the lines of “a rave shouldn’t be illegal”. But in britain, it is. Yes, really. Not concerts or parties, but raves.

The reasons are probably that overtime raves became a problem for some and they wanted something done against them. The other side was not intrested in fighting it and so things got passed into law and voila, you got a specific type of party made illegal.

England, believe it or not is still democracy. More so now then in the last couple of decades because it is no longer ensured who is going to win an election in a region. Safe seats aren’t that safe anymore.

If YOU don’t fight for your rights, then someone else wins with their rights. The problem with raves is simple, it is the struggle between the neighbours who want a quiet night and the party people who don’t. Both have rights but they can’t both excersise them fully without restricting the other.

So either the ravers turn down the music or the neighbours give up their quiet night. Ideally, both sides should work this out but as you can see on this side, working things out ain’t part of human nature. The anti rave laws have come into being to deal with “illegal” events being held at random location with absolutely no care being given for the consequences. This doesn’t just upset the neighbours, it upsets others in the entertainment industry. Not entirely fair is it that a local pub has to spend a fortune on sound isolation but a random group can just hold a rave anywhere, break every law that exists, not pay taxes and get away with it?

The law didn’t come into place because YOU played techno in your yard and the neighbour complained. It came into being from 1000+ parties being held in location with no fire safety, no securty, causing serious disturbances. Not just noise, but traffic and things like fights breaking out.

The ravers suffered the public wrath and did NOT regulate themselves to fit into society. Of course, that is not a rebel thing to do but it is the thing to do if you don’t want society to turn against you. Because as silly as this story is, the average voter (that is people who actually do vote, not just people who can vote) doesn’t give a shit. They just see the tabloids depiction of ravers as crazed druggies, heared from someone at work how a rave is a warzone and are all in favor.

Democracy is just another word for dictatorship of the many. The raves that got out of control created these laws, which weren’t oppososed by the ravers themselves and now you got this silly situation.

Most laws are silly, but exist because people are silly. If a lot of rave parties didn’t cause such a nuisance (you could hold a rave party the same as any other concert and follow laws of fire safety, drugs laws and noise pollution) then there would be no desire to have them restricted. There are laws that says you can’t drill into your wall after or before a specific hour in a building that isn’t standalone. Why? Because someone found it neccesary to drill all night in an apartment block. Well not SOMEONE. A LOT of someone’s. The apartment block is actually a good example, an old flat might easily have several hundred of apartments and drilling in one sound through the entire building. If a person only drill once every 3 years, it takes less then 1000 people to have drilling going on day in day out.

That is the reason there are rave laws and lots of others. Because without them people just can’t be consider the affect their action have on others.

Want to protest that? Then don’t say “it shouldn’t be illegal”. You should made sure when the laws were introduced that it didn’t become illegal by doing the same thing the petitioners did. Make your case and show that YOUR case benefits the greater good (gets the most people to vote for you).

RTFA - misleading summary - by Cougem (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
1) The police didn’t scour facebook - locals did, saw it, and reported it as a rave. 
 
2) The helicopter was out anyway, and they just asked the helicopter to fly over the site to really check if there was a party on its way back 
 
It was not police scouring facebook and dispatching a helicopter.  
 
It embarrasses and annoys me that this happened in my own country, which I do love dearly, but I wont let the usual anti-UK/US/Australia facebook crowd exaggerate it further.

Re:RTFA - misleading summary - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Apparently, they had caused problems before and were told to get a license before having the next party.

They acknowledge this by saying they pointed the speakers away from the village to reduce the noise.

If you have ever lived in the country, you know how far sound travels at night. Pointing the speakers in any direction would have little effect.

They knew they had caused problems before, and were told they had to get a license befoe having another party. They failed to observe the warnings. Enough is enough. I would have them boiled in oil.

It is amazing how Slashdot publishes articles with such misleading descriptions. It is becoming a useful exercise to try to analyze the facts as stated, then figure out what to look for to find the truth.

Mike Monett 
Midland

Sure, yeah, I can believe that - by TheModelEskimo (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Yeah, I have neighbors who do the whole “BBQ” thing. They like to stay up “barbecuing” until about 4:30 a.m., and one of them in particular likes to rap an entire song’s worth of memorized rap lyrics in a loud monotone for several minutes at a time. 
 
Now, I don’t want camouflaged police showing up, but when I call the cops and these guys demand to know “which neighbor was it?” and STILL don’t shut up after the cops are gone, I have to think that somebody with a Facebook account and a field is probably driving his neighbors FREAKING insane. 
 
Thank goodness for my linux box and synths that can play a nice loud PSHHHHHHTTTT sound, brown or pink as you like it. (Had to work linux in there somehow)

Started with a barbeque, but.. - by andersa (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Frankly I am old enough and bitter enough to just want kids like that off my lawn, my neighboors lawn, and if they are loud enough, the field next to it as well for that matter.

From BBC news - “But local people, fearing a rave was going to take place after previous events with loud music at the same premises, alerted the police.”

In other words, this bunch were notorious around town for partying all through the night, playing loud music and generally being a pain in the ass to everybody else. They may have been just barbequeing when the police showed up, but the locals knew what was comming and decided enough was enough.

Development schedules - by BuR4N (Score: 4, Informative) Thread
Sure, SpaceX is behind the schedule with the Falcon 9 and recently lost a customer ( http://spacefellowship.com/2009/07/13/spacex-lost-falcon-9-customer/ ). But if we look on the bright side, what SpaceX have accomplished so far, took two superpowers and a brewing cold war last time, for example the Merlin engine is the first new engine designed in the US since the 60’s , they have launched Falcon 1 successfully recently ( http://www.spacex.com/press.php?page=20090715 ) and pushes forward with the Dragon spacecraft ( http://www.spacex.com/dragon.php ). I think all this speaks volume about private space flight and the very important role that X-Prize and such plays.

Re:Development schedules - by cheesybagel (Score: 3, Informative) Thread
for example the Merlin engine is the first new engine designed in the US since the 60’s

Nope. The SSME, RS-68 were developed after the 60’s.

Is it worth it? - by Tubal-Cain (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread
$1.5 billion? Wikipedia says the Apollo Program cost $135 billion, adjusted for inflation. I doubt many parties participating in these competitions are in it for the prize money.

Re:Is it worth it? - by burning-toast (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

I’m of the opinion that setting foot on the moon the very first time was the most expensive time considering it took the entirety of human knowledge up until that time to make it happen (plus a bit of fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants engineering). Each trip after that would only require a fraction of the original research as it’s a matter of tuning or tweaking a somewhat known quantity (albeit still expensive). 
. 
What do we value all of the knowledge and research which we gained from those missions at? 
. 
I too doubt that only the prize money is attracting them. But having 1.5B of your investment back isn’t too shabby. Also being able to lay claim that you (and your corporate sponsors) were “the first to do X” for a given industry is quite important (especially to the investors). 
. 
Overall, I like the X-prize financing scheme (as someone NOT directly involved in any way). 
. 
For some reason I can’t get paragraph breaks in my text. Pardon the periods.

GLXP is unwinnable - by QuantumG (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

My last rant on the subject:

> Nice YouTube video on the Google Lunar X Prize competition: 
> 
> Moon 2.0: Join the Revolution. 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K4zosGUMBw

Heh, I remember this video. It’s about as realistic as the prize.

1. Interest in launch watching goes up 100,000% 
2. The rocket is so damn fast that it can get the lander to the Moon in seconds. 
3. Doesn’t even need a stage to enter lunar orbit. 
4. The lander doesn’t even have a main engine.. apparently RCS is all 
you need to land on the Moon now. 
5. Uplink antennas only need to be the size of your typical hand held 
umbrella. 
6. The rover doesn’t need to fit in the lander. 
7. It doesn’t even need an antenna. 
8. Rutan is great, all hail SpaceShipOne. The reusable, reliable, 
less expensive revolution is here! It’s so reusable it never flew 
again. 
9. “The competition ignited a revolution that will launch thousands of 
civilian passengers into space.” Any day now. 
10. “The Moon.. only days away” .. way to point out your own 
spin-doctoring, see point 2. 
11. re Apollo “These early missions learned much about the Moon .. but 
they were much too expensive .. and lacked any long term plan, so in 
1972 Moon 1.0 was abandoned.” Ohhhh.. that’s why it was abandoned.. 
cause there was no long term plan! I thought it was because the 
public lost interest .. see point 1. 
12. Cut to terribly interested people, thanks to the Internet! 
13. Queue weasel words about how resources on the Moon “could” provide 
Earth with clean affordable limitless energy. 
14. “Much of the lunar soil is silicon, a key ingredient in solar 
cells” .. *facepalm*. 
15. Solar Power Satellites using lunar resources.. and there’s that 
weasel word again. 
16. Bonus prizes for doing impossible things.. I mean, more impossible 
than just winning the major prize at a profit.. which is the only 
reason why you’d care about the bonuses. The one mentioned is lunar 
ice.. because landing at the poles is so obviously easy with today’s 
super rockets, see point 2. 
17. Apparently shining a torch at the ground is sufficient to do 
spectral analysis to determine the presence of lunar ice. Someone 
call the LCROSS folks! 
18. Bonus for surviving the lunar night, complete with kitschy “wake 
up now little rover” scene. 
19. Oh, and the most stupid Bonus prize of them all. A prize for the 
team that can find artifacts of previous lunar exploration. Yes, 
that’s right, because if it wasn’t hard enough that we suggest you 
land at the pole, we’re now suggesting that you drive to the equator.. 
or maybe you only do this bonus, in which case you “only” have to do a 
precision landing, should be no trouble with the advanced lander 
propulsion system, see point 4. 
20. More shots on the lander approaching the Moon at warp factor 5, 
with no orbital insertion engine and no descent engine. 
21. ”… and this time we’re planning to stay.” queue music.

This video, most graphically, demonstrated to me that the GLXP is a 
gimmick, backed by morons with no serious understanding of the amazing 
achievement that Apollo really was. Apparently the prize will be won 
by bored teenagers who will subsequently shrug off the whole “space is 
hard” myth and go build a lunar base to make constellations of solar 
power satellites to stick it in the face of their baby boomer 
grandparents who didn’t have the vision to do it the first time around 
and subsequently destroyed the planet. /rant

More ambitious? - by Hurricane78 (Score: 2) Thread

More weapons, combinations, drugs, little things, cool story, and sheer fun, like in, you know, System Shock 1?? ;)

I find it annoying, that BioShock is so dumbed down. As if they wanted to have dumber clients/buyers/players on average. It’s all about money, I guess. So beef up the graphics (remember how they talked about the water FX half the time of the hype videos?).

I give credit for the athmosphere and Big Daddy / Little Sister thing though. But I miss all that love of details. I’d even give most of the graphics to have that back. 
Like I loved the GTA series for the car lights that made lines in the air when it rained, and all the thousand funny little things in them.

Oh, and the psychology is SS1/2 was really creepy, with things like Shodan sending all the cyborgs in when you angered him, with things like finding a log, listening to it while seeing an image of the women talking, and then looking up into a air duct and finding the severed head of her. Then throwing that head onto the attacking buggy medical robot. With things like getting halucinations, being on heavy drugs, drunk, hooked to a freaking cyberspace machine, pushing anti-radiation medicine into you, always in fear of a cyborg killing you while logged in. And then Shodan telling you some shit about you being an insect insulting a god.

Grow! Do something better. Beat that! :) 
(Yeah, I know how hard it is. But when you see it come to life, it is the greatest and most fun thing you will ever have done.)

Never fired anybody? EVER? - by TheModelEskimo (Score: 2) Thread
It’s pretty amazing that (according to TFA) they’ve never laid anybody off. I mean, that feature is there for a reason. I find it hard to believe that they never hired some total incompetent jerk that they didn’t want gone, so maybe they just pay those guys good money to quit. Or maybe they hire assassins. :)

Re:Never fired anybody? EVER? - by Hurricane78 (Score: 2) Thread

Or maybe it’s a lie. Or maybe they do not exist long enough.

I know that before all that, there was Irrational Games, and Looking Glasses. If you always close your company and make a new one when you would have to fire people, of course you will never have “fired” someone (at the current company).

But I must say, that as usual, it’s EA’s fault again. Oh, and the idiots who buy EA games like /(NBA|NFL|FIFA|WTF|BBQ|ETC) (199|200)[0-9]/, and the next pack of 20 virtual “H&M” clothes, all looking like each other, for The Sims for $39.99. (Yes, that really exists! I did crack those packs for some girls I know, only to remove them again because they were so crappy that they were not worth the bytes they occupied.)

Re:Never fired anybody? EVER? - by maugle (Score: 2) Thread
Laying someone off is very different from firing someone for incompetence.

Re:Never fired anybody? EVER? - by TheModelEskimo (Score: 2) Thread
I dunno, can you back that up with a juicy story or something?

Signal to Noise ratio over time