Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:faster than light = time travel (Score 1) 226

what is an ansible?

In some science fiction stories such as the Ender's Game novels, an ansible is a method of communicating over great distances FTL. Two quantum-entangled particles transmit information between each other. And apparently, from a previous post I just replied to, another author Ursula LeGuin has used the term. And checking wikipedia it seems she coined the term, in 1966. Card must have borrowed the term for Ender's Game.

A fascinating thought. Who knows if such a thing will ever exist.

Comment Re:faster than light = time travel (Score 1) 226

Faster than light communication cannot be done by any means we know of, so I borrowed an instantaneous communicator from some of Ursula K. LeGuin's books.

Huh. I have never heard of her. Honestly I thought your use of "ansible" came from Orson Scott Card's books. So did he pick up the term himself from one of her books?

Comment Re:Not news... Use better passwords. (Score 1) 110

Hopefully as people become more aware of such basic weaknesses, vendors will be under pressure to stop shipping devices with default credentials built-in, naively expecting grandma's and grandpa's to actually change them.

That's a big hope :-) When we install new wireless internet service in the various remote locations our customers live in, they purchase a wi-fi router from us and we configure the damn things ourselves. Unless they already have a router, of course, then we check it out and make sure it's locked down. It's the only way to be sure.

Comment Re:This isn't a question (Score 3, Insightful) 623

You seem to be a retard who can't think for himself. Every civilization in the history of mankind has condemned sodomy and never define marriage as anything but between a man and women.

Every civilization in the history of mankind? I don't know why you're calling someone else a retard.

So-called "sodomy" in many ancient societies hasn't always been seen as condemning someone to live eternity in hell. Ancient Greek and Roman societies, for example, were pretty loose in that regard.

You want to claim every people in history were a bunch of fools, be my guest. But, only other fools will believe you.

It was the same then as it is now; in any random group of humans, at least 1 in 10 are homosexual. And others were born with a gender but in their mind they *know* they are a different gender. I'm happy to be comfortable in my male skin, but small-minded people like you just can't grasp the concept.

It's always been this way and it always will. Get over it.

Comment Re:ChromeOS (Score 1) 99

My first impression was, "WTF?! Why would anyone want to do that?" Keep in mind that not only am I typing this on a Chromebook, I basically live on this thing. For what I use it for, it works well. With a web based IDE and an SSH client, you can accomplish almost anything. Entertainment is not a pleasant situation but that's what we have gaming PCs for, right?

The entertainment does suck! But after my old crappy laptop screen went kablooey I got an Acer C720 Chromebook. Not quite top-of-the-line. I was pleasantly surprised to find I could start up crosh and it has an ssh client! Well, and ping. Not much else.

I installed ChrUbuntu 12.04 on my boss's chromebook and it wasn't bad. I do think it's a tad slower than chromeos, though. Booting up of course, and general operation. And I am going to stick it on mine, too, although I've used it long enough that having to clear "all local data" could be pain when/if I ever boot up chromeos again and want to login to a bunch of places.

Comment Re:Seems fair (Score 1) 108

I just keep adding these low-value (as in, user content) TLDs to blacklists, particularly for email. I'm sure I'm not the only sysadmin doing that, so the overall utility of all these stupid TLDs is basically as a spam-filter and nothing more. No serious business is going to operate on anything other than a .com/.net/.org even if they have to get a longer domain.

You are correct: you're not the only one. I noticed a massive increase in spam the last couple of months from snowshoe spammers using .science, .rocks, .cricket (cricket!), etc, etc, etc. And not a single legitimate message that I can tell. They're the new .infos

Comment Re:Systemic and widespread? (Score 1) 489

That happened with this one as well. It doesn't show the previous action which led up to the officer and the suspect being out in the middle of the grass after a traffic stop

I don't think that was an edit. The man who recorded the video on his cellphone said he was walking to work and saw the beginning of the altercation, then got out his phone and started recording. He got in touch with the family and their lawyer, and handed over the video to them, which they then gave to the NY Times. If he had caught the start of the thing on his phone we would have seen it by now.

Comment Re:Stop dragging it out (Score 1) 250

Go ahead and give him a life sentence and get this over with. He'll die soon enough in prison, especially of the guards "accidentally" happen to be looking the other way. He's pretty recognizable, and he definitely won't be the most popular position no matter where he is sent to.

They might send him to the supermax prison in Colorado, where the federal government has sent many a high-profile convict. Interaction with others, even guards, is stricly limited and there is 100% (supposedly) video surveillance. The one hour a day they get to exercise is in a cage all alone.

Comment Re:Obligatory XKCD (Score 1) 104

Man I love 8.8.8.8

I do, too! We did run into a bit of a mess the other day, however, when a domain name somewhat important to us, that was thought to be on auto-renew, was expired. (I know, I know, big screwup) Our registrar then changed the name servers to their own. So we renewed it within a couple of hours, and we generally use our own caching servers, but some of our stuff out there is using google's DNS, and it seems they ignore the TTL for NS records, using their own TTL of, I think, 22600 seconds which equals more than 15.5 days. Ouch! The registrar sets a TTL on those of minutes.

I imagine it was a decision made to save resources. So, I think if google's DNS servers are being used widely, lesson learned from us if you ever need to change your domain's name servers.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."

Working...