Mod parent up! This is quite awesome (I actually found it more interesting than this topic). I do wonder if it will ever come to a point when people will start shooting drones down that cross over to their property. Most likely to occur in America or Russia/Eastern Europe, due to the general population being more pro-gun then in the EU nations.

Are there any legal issues with shooting down drones over your territorry in the USA? I presume you can shoot all you want on your land, what about above it?

Here you go: http://code.google.com/p/pyrit/

I used it a few years ago for testing the security of my Bebox WiFi router (with default "random" key). Be are a UK ISP , and they were very nice when I contacted them, and since then the new Beboxes no longer have this weakness.

Article here if you want a read: http://www.ziva-vatra.com/index.php?aid=53&id=R2VuZXJhbCBJbmZv

I'm not so sure... I mean, most people (myself included) who drive sports cars don't do it for ego, narcissism, or for some sort of penis competition. We drive our cars for the experience, the sounds, feeling and exhilaration when you put your foot down.

My sports car is fast, but not particularly so. A Tesla would beat it easily, as would most other modern sports cars. However when driving it it feels like you're going fast. I did 150mph in a modern German 4 door car, and you know what? I didn't feel like it, it was rather refined and pedestrian. The only thing that gave away the speed was where the needle was pointing on the speedo, and how fast things were moving outside.

In my car, doing 100mph feels a lot faster. Hell, I've had passengers ask me by how much I was breaking the speed limit when I wasn't breaking it at all. It is low down, it is noisy, and you feel the G forces round the corners.

For me the sound is part of the fun, I would probably never want an electric sports car. Many people seem to be lost in the speed competition. If speed by itself was fun everyone would have the time of their lives on an airplane.

If I had to have an Electric car, it would not be a sports car, it would most likely be a replacement for the autobahn cruiser I mentioned above. In that you can't really hear the engine anyway, and you're so isolated that it would not matter whether it was ICE, electric, or had a bunch of hamsters running full pelt under the bonnet.

Perhaps that is a better place for Tesla to try and push the electric car, and from what I heard that is what they intend to try next.

Yeah, but I think it has become over-regulated. Almost all the cars are identical, with minor tweaks here and there. I guess for me, I used to watch F1 for the technological/engineering feats, as much as for seeing Senna work miracles in the corners.

I loved seeing what method they used to gain an advantage. From "ground effect" skirts to seeing how much turbo power they could eck out of a tiny engine, to phenomenally high revving V12 engines, to one F1 car having 6 wheels, and another having a fan at the back so suck it down to the road.

Nowadays all the cars have to use a specific engine configuration, of a specific size, with specific inlet/exhaust restrictions, specific everything. Only some aerodynamic tweaks are offered. Combined with so much computer assisted driving there is very little to distinguish different machines. It is so much more generic and bland now.

Which is probably why, as the years go by, formula 1 seems less and less interesting to me. The main reason I used to watch it is precisely because it was about the peak of car technology. I watched it to see phenomenally powerful exotic cars that I would not see in real life, coupled with men with both the talent and balls to drive these machines to their limits. Sometimes on some very exotic circuits in far away places.

I loved watching F1 and Rally in the 80's, then in the 90's, but afterwards F1 just went downhill (Now I mostly watch rally races, but I do miss the 80's group B). I don't know, but to me F1 looks like its turned into a glorified testing ground for technology to put into road cars. It just isn't that interesting anymore.

As for formula E, I don't know about others, but for me part of the reason I liked watching the F1 was precisely because of the noise. Watching what are essentially glorified milk cars whizzing around quietly just doesn't stir my soul.

Maybe there are people who will like watching this. I will give it a go if it ever begins, but I'm not holding my breath.

Not to sound flippant, but maybe try a window manager that supports tabbing? fluxbox does, so you can tab any program (I usually have firefox and evince tabbed, along with audacious media player for music on one display, and tons of terminals on the other, usually tabbed by task/server). It really seems like a windowmanger designed for heavy linux users, and is scriptable to boot!

It has no 3D eyecandy though, so is light and fast, but might not be to your taste if you originally started out with Gnome.

Or maybe there was a better energy source available to them? Something that made digging out fossils out of the ground seem pointless? Then they could well have used that all up, leaving the oil behind. It would probably have been some chemical based energy source, just like oil, due to the potential energy density.

Then again, if there were humans so advanced that they left the planet. Where would they have gone to? And why? Seems like a massive slog to the nearest place with a potential earth-like planet, and we don't seem to see any evidence of them in our immediate neighbourhood.

And we have found natural nuclear reactors (and by extension, naturally occurring by-products.see here). So it is possible they used those, or knew up about them early on.

Yeah, I can vouch for this. Since facebook became popular I only every see one other person logging into my msn chat, and we don't chat via it anyway. Out of almost 40 people, nobody uses it or their hotmail.com addresses anymore, some have not logged in for years. I pretty much keep it there just for posterity (I've been on msn since if first came out, ironically, also because everyone just shifted to using msn messenger and I had no choice but to follow or lose contact) but will probably not notice if it vanished tomorrow.

If they were to shut down msn, I probably won't notice that much, thankfully fb chat is XMPP based, so I can connect to it with a normal jabber client, so it could have been a worse alternative.

The Russians are only following what the EU/America did 10 years earlier to Serbia (Considered an ally of Russia). I strongly suspect that the reason the EU/US didn't protest much was due to the fact they didn't have a leg to stand on (don't throw rocks from glass houses and all that).

The west Annexes part of a Russian ally, Russia annexes part of a Western Ally. Geopolitics at work, only the small countries and their peoples suffer.

Unfortunately not, but people being misled due to their own ignorance/fear/stupidity is as old as time, I'm just pointing out to you that this "condition" is not due to religion, but a human condition. People could just as blindly follow other/non-religious ideologies, and even die for them.

Exactly, it is a people problem. Specifically a lack of critical thinking, perhaps a better education system would be a solution, but critical thinkers are not good for people in power. Never were.

I have to say, I don't know what happened to Slashdot if this is true. Who on earth can come to a nerd site and honestly believe (e.g.) that evolution is wrong. I mean, how can you reject science, yet be the type of person who hangs about here? (Unless they are trolling, I guess...)

A lot of cartoons I watched as a child are nowadays considered racist, and are banned. Does that make them bad cartoons? I watched them a lot, I grew up with them, yet didn't turn into a racist bigot.

Same goes for comic books, literature, art and a bunch of of other things. As long as you understand the context of when something was written and what was socially accepted at the time, and realise that we've moved on from there and it is no longer acceptable, then I see no problem with the message itself.

I think I covered this above. Back then it was socially acceptable. Nowadays it isn't. Understand it within the context. We've moved along a lot in 2000 years.

Well... no not really. You just interpret the teachings yourself. Spirituality is something that should be private to a person, not something you should project to the world, and definitely not something you should force people in, or beat them over the head with.

Humans seem to have had religious beliefs throughout the ages. We have evidence of spiritual beliefs going back thousands of years. Yes, the way we seek enlightenment varies, from polytheism, monotheism, spiritualism, and beyond. They are all aiming for the same goal, but in different ways and interpretations.

To sit here and tell me that one specific version, one specific text, is the one truth and only way, just shows a level of brainwashing that is both impressive and scary.

I honestly don't know what to tell you. I meet many Americans, and the non-religious ones really have a chip on their shoulder about religion. This is unfortunately because your breed of Christians are such extremists. Those evangelicals are quite frankly nutbags, properly off their hinges. I've met a few of them, and they scare the shit out of me. Most of Christianity (and religions in general) are not like that, just like not every Muslim is an Islamist ready to stone people to death for dancing to music.

I noticed another thing about Americans as well, and US culture. You're not very big on compromise. You see the world in black and white, no gray, it is all a case of "my way or the highway". Either the bible is the complete truth or it is nothing. Either you are for free-market or you're a communist. Either your with us or against us., etc....

In a world of grays I don't know how you get anything done, it is all completely polarised. You waste so much time and effort just arguing its amazing. Especially over things the rest of us couldn't really give a toss about.

I mean, this whole thing about evolution/creation for example. In a sane situation this would not even be discussed (how can you deny something that has been proven to happen? We have evidence), yet somehow this has become yet another battleground. The rest of the world (including religions) have no qualms about evolution. We probably have a minority which don't believe in evolution, but no one takes them seriously.

I'm not quite sure what you're saying, but I'll try to respond.

I sure never considered the bible as a holy book in of itself. The stories in it are sacred, in that they describe the life of Jesus/god/etc... and provide guidence in how to get "closer" to god. The book itself is just a medium for transmitting knowledge from one person to another.

You are praying to God/Jesus. If you take it to be true that there is a god, then you are praying to him in order to become closer to him, the path to enlightenment. The texts are a guidence on how to pray to god, not something you pray to itself, nor to hang on every word.

Because they are stupid and/or uneducated, Science and Religion do not step on each others toes. Religion tries to answer philosophical questions (the "Why"), Science tries to answer questions about reality (the "How"). I am a scientiest as well, and never saw a clash (hell, they don't even meet). Here in Europe a lot of scientists are religious, and almost all religious people don't have a problem with science.

Hell, I know some Scientists who became priests, including some Doctors. I admit I find it a bit odd, but it isn't an extraordinary occurance.

You think I'm wrong? Good! A debate is no fun if everyone agrees :P

The fact is, that the bible was originally a guide, listing out a way of getting closer to god. It was not the only guide, there are others, including the buddists, etc... and these were not in conflict with each other.

In the beginning, there was a problem though. Most people were illiterate. They needed a literate person to read the guide to them. In time these people became the preachers/clergy, and through them developed churches, amassing a large amount of wealth and power in doing so (as usual, he who controls information has power, it isn't just an effect of the "information age", it is as old as time).

This made sense back then. However so much time has passed that going to church to be "read to" became normal, despite most people now being able to pick up the book and read/interpret it themselves. To this day I argue with some Christians who believe that the preacher/priest is the only one who is "right" on matters of god (In my case, Catholics are big on the hierarcial power structure, so many arguments with them) .

The book is a guide, it is for you to go on a personal journey of spiritual enlightenment, and to give you a rough background to what happened in the past (and how bad it was before humans went on the path to enlightenment). Nothing more, nothing less. Some people ignore chunks of it, some churches ignore chunks of it. It is all up to your interpretation.

The problem is when people stop thinking for themselves, and start being spoon fed by others. And who then become convinced that the interpretation they are fed is the "right" one. This, unfortunately, is not a problem with religion as much it is a human problem. We see it everywhere, from tribes/politics/nations states, to opinions on all sorts of things, including the idea of "correct" behavior. As a species we seem to like order and conformity. If religion dissapeared tomorrow, nothing much would change "on the ground" so to speak.

Some things to note (common arguments I see in the US between religion and science):
* Nowhere in the bible does it give a timeframe for the creation of earth. This "the earth is 6000 years old" is something I've only heard coming out of Americans.
* The only thing I know of that has a time frame is Genesis, where God created the earth in 6 days. This is also not to be taken literally (exactly what is a "day" to an omnipotent deity with no concept of time?). Humans have a finite livespan, so I can see this story being described in a way that would make sense to human concepts of time.
* Evolution is how things work, nothing about that goes against religion (If I was a god, I sure as hell would not want to micromanage the development of every single lifeform in the universe. Evolution seems like an elegant solution).

Never heard of this, nor what it means. Looking at wikipedia points that this is an act of reaffirming your sprirtual faith. I see no problem with that, if people feel like they've rediscovered spiritualism/god/whatever, more power to them. It pretty much sounds like someone being baptised into the Christian faith (the whole concept of being born once "Physically" and again when you join Christianity). Like an initiation ritual. Not specific to Christianity, or religion for that matter.

My understanding is that is not part of the story of the bible. You have stories, and then you have what are basically instructions on how you should behave in order to be a good Christian. Depending on the denomination, these instructions can be altered/reinterpreted/modified by men (e.g. Catholocism has the pope as "gods representative on earth", which no other Church has (in fact they Consider Catholics heretics due to this) )*1.

Now this quote actually as some relevance to the point I was making. If you had to travel back 2000 years and explain to a barely literate goat-herder how they came to be, I doubt you'd go into explaining the big bang theory, string theory or infinate multiverse concept. You'd dumb it down to the point where a) they understand it, and b) they can relate to it.

Now that I think about it , the idea of "God" as an omnipotent entity that spans space and time pretty much sounds like our understanding of the Universe at the moment, just heavily simplified (and personified to human form so people can relate to it). The big bang was the catalyst for our creation, so I guess that could be dumbed down into "God made man".

I never said the bible was a work of fiction, just that it should not be taken literally, for a multitude of resons:

• * It was written 2000 years ago, when man was nowhere near as developed as they are now
• * It was written roughtly 300 years after Jesus was crucified, up until then being passed by word of mouth (Imagine chinese whispers that are multigenerational)
• * It was originally written in Old Aramaic, Translated into Coptic Greek, then Translated into Latin, and finally translated to other languages. No language is a one-to-one mapping and you can assume some bits were "lost in translation", transliterated into other sayings, or perhaps plain altered to suit the new culture/whim of powers that be.

I am sure that the Bible kept the general jist of what Christianity is about, but there is no way that it can be taken as the word of god literally, as in "this is 100% how it happened"

For anyone to sit here and tell me that the modern bible (as they read), is in any way the *unadultered word of god* to be taken literally, then they have some serious mental/cognative issues (or are just plain uneducated about the history of the Bible), and it worries me that one of the most powerful countries of earth might one day have a majority of these people in positions of power.

*1: Arguably I would say that there is no evidence for the need of a "Church" at all in order to be a Christian, I suspect that this has something to do with humans natural tendency to build hierarchial structures where ever they can. I would argue it is less the religeon that is the problem than the Churches (be they Christian/islamic/jewish/etc...), who use the excuse of religeon to push their agenda. Basically the whims of those men in power, like pretty much any power structure in the history of mankind.