"with an aim of better securing networks and facilitating better use of finite broadband resources"

If we have finite broadband resources, and they are already scarce enough that customers are demanding more from their connections that can be given to them, why will allowing random passing strangers to decrease the amount of available bandwidth to everyone else help?

Sorry, it's just an open wifi hotspot. We don't want really them in our homes. We certainly don't want random passing strangers to have them on our connection and traceable only to ourselves, for the hassle if nothing else.

Surely my freedom of using my own computing resources trumps anyone else's?

The only thing I can see them useful for is hacking their firmware. Otherwise, I could just switch back on the various options my ISP tries to force onto my router to share with random strangers that I turned off in the first place.

Please don't lose sight of the real problem:

If nVidia just pulled their finger out and gave these guys proper documentation, or at least a hint, or a hand, or maybe even some damn code, things would have moved HUNDREDS OF TIMES FASTER.

These people are finding out how to do this stuff by probing the card, listening to what the driver does, and that's all extremely low-level stuff on undocumented chips.

The fact it works AT ALL is because these guys are fucking good at what they do and are trying extremely hard. It's not just a case of slapping a debugger on a low-level driver like this, as the interaction with system buses and the entirely unknown instruction sets and memory maps make ANY probing and testing extremely time-consuming and liable to damage stuff.

Or nVidia could just say "Here you go, guys, the reason you couldn't do this before is X and you just need to initiliase Y before you probe Z..."

There are 21 comments.

I don't think a Slashdotting is anywhere near what it used to be. In fact, it's a while since I heard of one.

You can teach your own children what you like. However, the real news here is:

"The Government is just not funding .... state funded schools."

Someone will explain how, if you want to be a state-funded school, you intend to get state-funding while teaching creationism. You won't, is the answer.

It's a block to government funding. As you might imagine, the government funding of schools (even "free" schools - notice they are not INDEPENDENT schools which receive no government funding and are often called "private schools" [and confusingly in the UK "public schools" but that's another matter]. They are state-funded. And the government will not fund you if you're teaching creationism.

Hence why words like "banned", "prevent" etc. appeared in the summary.

You can do it, but the government won't help you do it. And if you go "independent", then you could have always done that anyway - and you have to ask the PARENTS to fund your school, not the government.

But any school that you might be sent to as part of your legal requirement for education? They won't be able to teach creationism.

So you can do it yourself, or you can spend lots of money to fund a school that will do it for you. But what won't happen is the blanket, free, state education in the UK covering creationism.

You always have a choice. The question is how much is that choice worth to you? Are your religious beliefs worth paying for? This isn't impinging on anyone's freedom of religion. You can BE any religion you like. You just won't get taught it in school science lessons (RE, that's another matter entirely), nor will we exclude "non-believers" from the same lessons that you are in. If you want that kind of exclusive, "cult"-ish, blinkered education, you're free to choose it and fund it.

But don't make the state cater for every crackpot religion out there out of its own pocket.

You could just read TFA:

"[A]ny doctrine or theory which holds that natural biological processes cannot account for the history, diversity, and complexity of life on earth and therefore rejects the scientific theory of evolution."

Basically, if you claim that anything other than simple biology was at work in creating animals, then you lose your funding (and possibly right to call yourselves a school).

You can claim that God made biology possible by creating a universe in which biology could make them exist, but you can't claim that God "created" animals at all.

Because sometimes, just sometimes, we actually have a brain.

So you've managed to kill off Freshmeat (first with a stupidly unnecessary name-change, then allowing crappy "Download Button" ads on a download site, now by removing it's only purpose).

What the hell do you have planned for Slashdot next?

How about, rather than destroying these venerable brands, you actually try and USE THEM rather than let them slide into obscurity?

It's not a question of it being soft or not. It was a question of getting it out when the machine crashed. The models in question would not let you eject the discs even on boot-up (unlike every other CD drive I've ever seen - supply power, push button, out comes CD - worst that happens is you have be quick before the OS sucks the drive tray back in, or press Pause/Break on the BIOS to give yourself time).

That's not even counting the fact that ALL non-Mac CD drives have a MANUAL emergency eject hole. Paperclip to the rescue.

There were numerous incidents with many models of Mac where people basically had to have the machine physically repaired to get their CD back out because there was no way to open it.

And, as pointed out, a read-only medium? Who gives a shit. Even read-write, sometimes you still need to tug it and the OS should know that. That's what the write-cache options are FOR and why they're disabled for removable media (even though that's a huge performance drag).

There are precisely two viruses like this that have been "eradicated" by medicine, in the entire history of humankind. Two.

And one of those is suspected of making a comeback in a related form.

"Immunisation" buys you time, not immunity. We can't get 100% of people to pay taxes or abide by the law, what makes you think we can get 100% immunised?

Like using one particular chemical in weedkiller or rat poison - doesn't matter how many rats you kill, one will get immune to it and breed a generation immune to it really quickly, or a branch of the same genetic family will evolve to take it over. Even if you legislate (as some countries do) that you MUST use 2 or 3 totally unrelated chemicals at all times and never deploy them singly - still there are rats. And still there will be diseases getting through that are related to those you immunise.

Hell, we offer flu shots to the elderly for free in my country - hasn't even dented flu-like diseases. Immunisation helps. Blaming those percent that choose to decide what they put into their own bodies is just peer pressure and bullying. And, guess what, if you were actually "immunised" you wouldn't be able to catch it from them, or the evolved strains...

Because, for 90% of business, the only guy who needs to care about the IP address is the IT department.

And they rarely deal with IP addresses and when they do it's mostly copy/paste from some spreadsheet or management program.

Nobody cares what the IP is, nobody memorises what the IP is (maybe fleetingly to type it in somewhere else, but pretty much that's a one-time thing. DHCP takes away all internal IP management apart from the occasional fixed static which is no worse than having asset numbers (which you still have to deal with).

As such, memorable IP numbering is not the problem. Never was. I don't know what the IP is of my external servers, I don't really care. I have them somewhere, no doubt, but who cares? You point the DNS at it once and you're done. You allocate the lease pool and you're done. About the only IP number the average IT team must know are the DNS servers and the default gateway (which is usually .1 for reasons that have everything to do with ease of remembering).

Large corporations don't have a guy memorising the IP's. If anything, they are even more in the dark about exactly what IP's they have and they use, because they never see them except in some asset management program.

When you go to IPv6, it's even less important. Just forget about it. Stick the IPv6 of your DNS into your DHCP servers and you NEVER have to know a single IPv6 address again. In fact, a lot of setups I've seen have this without even knowing - you can be running IPv6 without even realising until something goes wrong and you spot an IPv6 address.

Stop the damn excuses. Deploy IPv6. You want that many IP's, you need to have unwieldy numberings. If you want to assign, say, an alphanumeric code instead of a purely numeric one, it only helps for so long (and we'd have put all our IPv4's into hexadecimal if it didn't).

Nobody cares about SID's, MAC's, GUID's, UUID's, etc. and they are just as long. Get in the real world - where it DOES NOT MATTER how long the data is, your setup just uses technologies and protocols available today to make them memorable where they need to be.

Maybe we'll see a return to proper programming to go with this new technology, then. I doubt it, but maybe.

From the "geniuses of design" that brought you "drag the cd to the wastebin to eject it", "no physical cd eject button", "imacs with power buttons you can't feel on the back of them", "phones that you lose signal on if you hold while using them to call" and more...

Now we have "over-stuffed proprietary charger that overheats".

The problem is not so much technology as simple physics.

It's just THAT HUGE a distance between even stars, let alone cavorting around the galaxy looking for places that might - with a few years of resource collection - provide you with a usable amount of energy to get to the next place.

And on the way, stop-offs are few, far-between, hard to make profitable and stopping, landing and then taking off again costs an awful lot of time, effort and energy that you have to take with you.

The chances are that if anything comes near, it'll only be interested in using us as a slingshot onto somewhere more interesting and what's to say our solar system is particular interesting to someone who's coursing their way across the galaxy by doing that - or even that our sun is worth riding past for those purposes at all.

It's not a question of technology really - if you have the technology, we hold no interest to you, if you don't, we won't see you any more than you'll see us. And the distances and forces involved and to be overcome are just so stupendous.

And then you work out that even if there are a billion stars in a galaxy, and a billion galaxies, the chances of someone bothering to wander past us, even if they are looking for us, is so infinitesimally small that it pales into insignificance.

And the biggest problem is really time. What if we're late developers, and everyone else has already been and gone? And quite how long would you need to explore a galaxy once you got the technology to hop around it, and are you still going to be strolling around in a billion years from now? Probably not. The chances of two such civilisations coinciding are small, the chances of them meeting are small, so it's not at all surprising.

More likely, our view of quite how unlikely it is is so underestimated because of our limited view of the universe that we just don't understand how optimistic we're being to even suggest the possibility.

Galaxy-hoppers would laugh at us from our one-planet, night-sky observations from which we're trying to extrapolate the entirety of existence for a universe.

That said, I firmly believe that there's other life out there somewhere. I just believe, even more strongly, that the maths says that the chances of us meeting it are so tiny that it's not worth worrying our "haha, just ONE planet? That's all you managed?" heads about it.

In the UK? Yes, it can be. Ask your insurance company.

And many uses of vehicles, including licenses, are covered by a "not for hire or reward" clause. Not to mention it being standard insurance boiler-plate.

Same for private pilots. Unless you've got a specific "passenger-carrying" licence for your plane/car, you're probably NOT allowed to be compensated for more than the reasonable costs of petrol (i.e. a friend agreement). The other exceptions are things like volunteering for a charity but even then the definition is so close you can't even (legally) take a chocolate from your passenger for the ride.

What the law is on deliberately obstructing a road as a licensed professional driver, I'm guessing is a LOT worse, though.

In case you haven't noticed - that already happens, to everyone.

Not only that, if you have a passenger-carrying license, you are given even less tolerance over speeding violations.

The fact that it might take two or three such violations to actually revoke a normal license if neither here nor there - if I was to just stop in a road and do 5 mph, I would be pulled over and penalised. Why not taxis? Just because they are doing it in protest?

If nothing else, it's childish and counter-productive. Nobody uses taxis! So we're going make all the taxis in London participate in a protest that makes them useless and damages other driver's ability to travel! That'll get me on your side, whether I'm a passenger or driver....