Yes, once there is value to human hair its price will rise. Since it's rising from zero, that will be infinity%, quite a sharp rise really. But the supply is enormous - 6 billion people getting a hair cut, all willing to undercut the next guy - so it will not become more expensive than silicon which needs to be mined and refined.
Agreed, the piece appears to have started with a conclusion and worked back to find arguments for it. While I don't disagree with the conclusion, there's one big thing I noticed lacking - comment on internationalisation.
One of my biggest beefs with apple is that sometimes I will click on a button to get information about something specific and I'm browsing the American site with American prices and links to the US apple store. Since I also use the $ symbol, this isn't immediately obvious, and it get frustrated when I'm ready to buy something and I have to go back to square one to get back to the Canadian site. Other than that, the actual design is clean and usable. But then, I don't have much trouble with most MS sites either.
I guess it probably depends on how valuable Apple's manufacturing business is to China. I'm willing to bet that iPods, laptops and pretty every other physical item in Apple's line is significant enough for them to pay attention. Some people might get disappeared.
But really, maybe Apple has learned a lesson here. Don't just validate cards using an algorithm. Keep track of which numbers you've sold, same as a credit card issuer.
In fact, this has what has always frightened me about Colbert. It's always struck me that a person of conservative bent could watch the show and not realise it was satire.
My own experience, from the people that I know - which is admittedly only a small number - is that downloading competes a lot more with DVD sale and rental revenues than with theatrical revenues. Everyone I know will still go to see a movie in the theatre if they're excited about seeing it.
At any rate I was really disappointed in the article. Every single source cited was either from Warner Bros., or the MPAA. At least a decent independant analysis would have been good for balance, don't just blindly cite the industry numbers for lost revenue. Also...a little perspective...the studio is still making back the cost of the movie plus a decent profit in the opening weekend. And while the absolute numbers are unusually large, turning a profit within the first week is pretty common.
I did, however, appreciate the admission is that the biggest concern is that word gets out about how crappy a movie is before people pay to see it.
Currently, English is the single most useful language in the world. It is the international language of commerce, diplomacy, and - along with math - science. I've met engineering students in Syria of all places that go to school in English.
So, at least at this point in time learning another language isn't the most useful thing for you to do. Predicting the future is hard, and but I would say that English is unlikely to be supplanted in the forseeable future. Its most likely competitor - Mandarin - while spoken by a lot of people, is unlikely to become the international standard simply because the vast majority of those people live in a single country. More widespread languages - French and Spanish - aren't exactly in economic ascendancy, so don't count on them either.
I think this is doubly true of computer programming, since programming languages have a syntax based in English, so programming without English knowledge is extra challenging.
That said, there's lots of other great reasons to learn another language. I like to travel, so I'm constantly bemoaning my restriction to only two languages. If that's your motivation, Spanish, Arabic and French are probably the most useful in terms of opening up the most countries.
Well, I don't see this sort of random name generation as a real problem...it's unlikely that you're the only person in the world with your name. So if you're really that unique, consider changing your name.
That said, it's not hard to bury these sorts of things. SEO typically works by creating lots of links to your official page. My flickr page is first result google kicks back for my name, with a professional photographer in Belfast with the same name coming in second. He's actually quite good if anyone cares.
Why do I win? Creative commons. My photography is not anything resembling professional quality, but I make most of it available for free. Everyone who uses my pictures has to attribute the picture, and most of them end up linking back. Lots of links means high googlerank. Result is that anything incriminating, legitimate or no, is buried at least past the first page.
Which is why, in my area, both the cable and telco offer what they refer to as "high speed light," which is price competitive with dial-up, doesn't jam up the phone line, and offers speeds of about 150kbps. Of course, the dishonest marketing dept advertises it as "5 times faster than dial-up*" with the star saying "*compared to 28.8 modem," which is what...1990 technology?
Still painfully slow for those of us used to our 5 Mbps connection, but for people who don't use much in way of video or high-res graphics, it works fine. For myself, who regularly uploads 15MB photos, and watch TV shows not available locally, not so useful.
And with about 5 million Macs out there, why wouldn't said programmer do so?
Because the same amount of time invested opens up a lot more victims.
And I'm saying that an environment of 5 million machines WOULD be exploited if it COULD be exploited.
First off, there are mac exploits, just not a lot. Second off, if the same amount of invested effort would give you a pool of potential victims that is orders of magnitude larger, why would you waste your time.
But more than that, just because somebody is looking for a hole, and a hole exists, doesn't mean that a small number of people are going to find it. Small number of people working on the...ummm...well let's call it a problem, means that the problem is less likely to be solved. Large number of people working on it greatly increases the odds of success. If you're going to argue that even a significant fraction of the number of criminals working on windows holes are working on Mac holes because, hey 5 million is a lot of machines, then I'm clearly not going to dissuade you. But you're wrong.
And it won't change if Macs suddenly become the dominant platform.
I'm sorry, but there's no gentle way to respond to this. If you think that it would make no difference if OS X was the dominant platform worldwide, then you're living in a fan-boy fantasy.
It's pretty unlikely that you'll ever know how well its kept. I doubt anyone's ever going to watch over 100 GBs of digital video about you child. Sorry. What you have is no different than the video tapes that my generation's childhood is stored on. They continue to gather dust in the basement, decade after decade.
No. If they were easy to crack, they would be cracked. Automatically. By a zombie scanning IP blocks.
A zombie can scan IPs for known security holes, but the programmer still has to design a virus, worm, etc. specifically for the Mac that will exploit that hole. The viruses that attack windows won't work on Mac...you have experiment and find different avenues of attack...identify the security hole to exploit. I maintain that few security holes have been identified because fewer people are looking for them, not because there are fewer of them.
The real issue is that Macs are very secure ON THEIR OWN. Not in relation to anything else.
Remind me again what makes the Mac very secure in an absolute sense? How do you measure it. Because the some of the well known vulnerabilities in other systems don't exist in the Mac?
Today, most boxes are cracked via worms, browser exploits and email attachments.
Are you saying the Mac doesn't receive email attachments, has a 100% secure browser, and isn't suseptible to worms?
Removing entire avenues of attack is possible with a Mac. Remove an avenue of attack and you've increased your security.
Removing avenues increases security, but it doesn't mean that a completely different system doesn't have different avenues of attack that don't exist in the competition. If you have an existing product, and close up one avenue of attack, odds are good that it hasn't opened up a new one, and the newer version will be more secure. When you build a different product, you can look at the mistakes made elsewhere and correct for them, but it's a pretty good bet that you've had the oversight or mistake elsewhere in your own design.
And it still seems like you're implying that the people at Apple have somehow come up with a brilliant way of stopping all attacks by worms, email attachements and browser exploits.
All I'm saying is that Mac's current security is due to market share, not intrinsic to design. Look, I'm a Mac user, too, but don't blind yourself or fool yourself into thinking that somehow those folks at Apple are geniuses who've made the perfect impenetrable system, while the dunces in Redmond couldn't figure out how to lock a door.
It's hard to write much about security holes when there isn't much of a history of attacks. Can we say "OSX is intrinsically more secure?" Maybe, certainly a lot of its default configuration tend to be more secure than Windows' defaults.
But what's made, and perpetuated, the notion that Macs are immune to viruses and other attacks is that there just aren't very many of them out there. Even with Mac's quickly growing market share, it's still far more lucrative to target mass market windows machines.
Ideally the machine should spit out a paper confirming your choices, and you should drop that in a box on the way out the door, after you verify it.
Actually, no. Many voters won't verify the print out in this way.
Touchscreen voting is inherently insecure for this reason. If the machine is spitting out wrong information, it will mostly go uncaught. If someone does catch it, it will be fixed and "the system works" will be the story.
Touchscreen is the wrong way to go. Secure e-vote systems start with a machine-readable paper ballot (one a little more advance than punchcards, which are prone to hanging chads...modern systems I've seen use an arrow where you fill in the black spot next to your candidate...actually quite challenging to screw up unintentionally). Thus the 'e-vote' is really just computer assisted counting.
The second step, with all e-vote systems, whether touchscreen with receipt or machine-readable ballot, is that the paper trail must not just exist, it must be used. This doesn't mean hand counting every vote, which would defeat the purpose, but it does mean an audit system to ensure the results line up with a sample set of sufficient size.
No one refers to the bill of rights anymore, because it's pretty meaningless. The problem with a bill of rights was that it has the same legal status as other laws, so, when it conflicts with another law, the courts have to resolve the conflict, but rights don't have a trump card.
That's why we got a Charter in 1982. It's a little different, so it's the one you should be referring to. And because it's part of the constitution, it does have supremacy over other laws.
Bullshit. While there have been hearings where someone made a discrimination complaint because they were offended, the complaints have always been dismissed. As they should be.
Clearly, this is why I was unsuccessful as an engineering student. Couldn't have anything to do with all those classes I skipped, or drinking nights when I should have been studying.
Really, being an engineering student was awesome. Except for the learning part.
Shaw also throttles BT traffic. To the point where unencrypted torrents barely move. Turned on encryption, and speeds went back up to the 300kB/s range.
Azureus supports this feature, and pretty much makes it idiot proof to use. I'm sure there's other clients that it'll work on, but I'm not sure which ones.
I'm sure it would be plastered all over the news if it was a risk to us anytime soon
That's kind of my point. Based on TFA, this is something which could conceivably happen, though the timespans mentioned seem to indicate that the odds of it happenning in our lifetimes are ridiculously low.
But if it were to go off, we'd have no warning. Yes, we wouldn't experience the event until 8000 years after it happenned, but since radiation travels at the speed of light, it would arrive at the same time as any visible indications. Your initial post seemed to indicate that we would see something, and then it would be another 8000 years before the radiation hits.
Your not that bright, are you? Whatever causes the beam to go off could have happenned 7999 years, 364 days ago, and we wouldn't have any idea until we see and experience it at the same time - tomorrow.
But realistically - I think the mass extinction scenario that's more likely is a Yellowstone eruption...seems like one's overdue, plus or minus perhaps tens of thousands of years. That's a lot less zeroes than this star thing.
I'm not going to lose any sleep over something some distance star does every trillion years or so.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, once there is value to human hair its price will rise. Since it's rising from zero, that will be infinity%, quite a sharp rise really. But the supply is enormous - 6 billion people getting a hair cut, all willing to undercut the next guy - so it will not become more expensive than silicon which needs to be mined and refined.
Agreed, the piece appears to have started with a conclusion and worked back to find arguments for it. While I don't disagree with the conclusion, there's one big thing I noticed lacking - comment on internationalisation. One of my biggest beefs with apple is that sometimes I will click on a button to get information about something specific and I'm browsing the American site with American prices and links to the US apple store. Since I also use the $ symbol, this isn't immediately obvious, and it get frustrated when I'm ready to buy something and I have to go back to square one to get back to the Canadian site. Other than that, the actual design is clean and usable. But then, I don't have much trouble with most MS sites either.
I guess it probably depends on how valuable Apple's manufacturing business is to China. I'm willing to bet that iPods, laptops and pretty every other physical item in Apple's line is significant enough for them to pay attention. Some people might get disappeared.
But really, maybe Apple has learned a lesson here. Don't just validate cards using an algorithm. Keep track of which numbers you've sold, same as a credit card issuer.
Has it occurred to you that all southerners may suffer from dementia? What with the inbreeding and all?
In fact, this has what has always frightened me about Colbert. It's always struck me that a person of conservative bent could watch the show and not realise it was satire.
You sorry bastards shouldn't be on google if you don't want to help people. Jeez.
I find that unlikely. It's not just that they don't make sense, you have to remember that they're wrong, too.
Might want to spellcheck that before sending it off. People with a poor grasp of the English language are generally not taken very seriously.
Ummm...RTFA. It's about University education. If young adults can't find their own way to school, they're clearly shouldn't be there.
My own experience, from the people that I know - which is admittedly only a small number - is that downloading competes a lot more with DVD sale and rental revenues than with theatrical revenues. Everyone I know will still go to see a movie in the theatre if they're excited about seeing it.
At any rate I was really disappointed in the article. Every single source cited was either from Warner Bros., or the MPAA. At least a decent independant analysis would have been good for balance, don't just blindly cite the industry numbers for lost revenue. Also...a little perspective...the studio is still making back the cost of the movie plus a decent profit in the opening weekend. And while the absolute numbers are unusually large, turning a profit within the first week is pretty common.
I did, however, appreciate the admission is that the biggest concern is that word gets out about how crappy a movie is before people pay to see it.
Currently, English is the single most useful language in the world. It is the international language of commerce, diplomacy, and - along with math - science. I've met engineering students in Syria of all places that go to school in English.
So, at least at this point in time learning another language isn't the most useful thing for you to do. Predicting the future is hard, and but I would say that English is unlikely to be supplanted in the forseeable future. Its most likely competitor - Mandarin - while spoken by a lot of people, is unlikely to become the international standard simply because the vast majority of those people live in a single country. More widespread languages - French and Spanish - aren't exactly in economic ascendancy, so don't count on them either.
I think this is doubly true of computer programming, since programming languages have a syntax based in English, so programming without English knowledge is extra challenging.
That said, there's lots of other great reasons to learn another language. I like to travel, so I'm constantly bemoaning my restriction to only two languages. If that's your motivation, Spanish, Arabic and French are probably the most useful in terms of opening up the most countries.
Well, I don't see this sort of random name generation as a real problem...it's unlikely that you're the only person in the world with your name. So if you're really that unique, consider changing your name.
That said, it's not hard to bury these sorts of things. SEO typically works by creating lots of links to your official page. My flickr page is first result google kicks back for my name, with a professional photographer in Belfast with the same name coming in second. He's actually quite good if anyone cares.
Why do I win? Creative commons. My photography is not anything resembling professional quality, but I make most of it available for free. Everyone who uses my pictures has to attribute the picture, and most of them end up linking back. Lots of links means high googlerank. Result is that anything incriminating, legitimate or no, is buried at least past the first page.
Which is why, in my area, both the cable and telco offer what they refer to as "high speed light," which is price competitive with dial-up, doesn't jam up the phone line, and offers speeds of about 150kbps. Of course, the dishonest marketing dept advertises it as "5 times faster than dial-up*" with the star saying "*compared to 28.8 modem," which is what...1990 technology?
Still painfully slow for those of us used to our 5 Mbps connection, but for people who don't use much in way of video or high-res graphics, it works fine. For myself, who regularly uploads 15MB photos, and watch TV shows not available locally, not so useful.
It's pretty unlikely that you'll ever know how well its kept. I doubt anyone's ever going to watch over 100 GBs of digital video about you child. Sorry. What you have is no different than the video tapes that my generation's childhood is stored on. They continue to gather dust in the basement, decade after decade.
Gah.
A zombie can scan IPs for known security holes, but the programmer still has to design a virus, worm, etc. specifically for the Mac that will exploit that hole. The viruses that attack windows won't work on Mac...you have experiment and find different avenues of attack...identify the security hole to exploit. I maintain that few security holes have been identified because fewer people are looking for them, not because there are fewer of them.
Remind me again what makes the Mac very secure in an absolute sense? How do you measure it. Because the some of the well known vulnerabilities in other systems don't exist in the Mac?Are you saying the Mac doesn't receive email attachments, has a 100% secure browser, and isn't suseptible to worms?Removing avenues increases security, but it doesn't mean that a completely different system doesn't have different avenues of attack that don't exist in the competition. If you have an existing product, and close up one avenue of attack, odds are good that it hasn't opened up a new one, and the newer version will be more secure. When you build a different product, you can look at the mistakes made elsewhere and correct for them, but it's a pretty good bet that you've had the oversight or mistake elsewhere in your own design.
And it still seems like you're implying that the people at Apple have somehow come up with a brilliant way of stopping all attacks by worms, email attachements and browser exploits.
All I'm saying is that Mac's current security is due to market share, not intrinsic to design. Look, I'm a Mac user, too, but don't blind yourself or fool yourself into thinking that somehow those folks at Apple are geniuses who've made the perfect impenetrable system, while the dunces in Redmond couldn't figure out how to lock a door.
It's hard to write much about security holes when there isn't much of a history of attacks. Can we say "OSX is intrinsically more secure?" Maybe, certainly a lot of its default configuration tend to be more secure than Windows' defaults.
But what's made, and perpetuated, the notion that Macs are immune to viruses and other attacks is that there just aren't very many of them out there. Even with Mac's quickly growing market share, it's still far more lucrative to target mass market windows machines.
And you think that the people who fall for phishing scams aren't going to be tricked if they can see the whole link?
Phishing is a social scam. It relies on stupidity, not technology. All emails being uglier does not make them more secure.
Touchscreen voting is inherently insecure for this reason. If the machine is spitting out wrong information, it will mostly go uncaught. If someone does catch it, it will be fixed and "the system works" will be the story.
Touchscreen is the wrong way to go. Secure e-vote systems start with a machine-readable paper ballot (one a little more advance than punchcards, which are prone to hanging chads...modern systems I've seen use an arrow where you fill in the black spot next to your candidate...actually quite challenging to screw up unintentionally). Thus the 'e-vote' is really just computer assisted counting.
The second step, with all e-vote systems, whether touchscreen with receipt or machine-readable ballot, is that the paper trail must not just exist, it must be used. This doesn't mean hand counting every vote, which would defeat the purpose, but it does mean an audit system to ensure the results line up with a sample set of sufficient size.
You're quoting from the wrong law.
No one refers to the bill of rights anymore, because it's pretty meaningless. The problem with a bill of rights was that it has the same legal status as other laws, so, when it conflicts with another law, the courts have to resolve the conflict, but rights don't have a trump card.
That's why we got a Charter in 1982. It's a little different, so it's the one you should be referring to. And because it's part of the constitution, it does have supremacy over other laws.
Bullshit. While there have been hearings where someone made a discrimination complaint because they were offended, the complaints have always been dismissed. As they should be.
Clearly, this is why I was unsuccessful as an engineering student. Couldn't have anything to do with all those classes I skipped, or drinking nights when I should have been studying.
Really, being an engineering student was awesome. Except for the learning part.
Have you tried transport encryption?
Shaw also throttles BT traffic. To the point where unencrypted torrents barely move. Turned on encryption, and speeds went back up to the 300kB/s range.
Azureus supports this feature, and pretty much makes it idiot proof to use. I'm sure there's other clients that it'll work on, but I'm not sure which ones.
That's kind of my point. Based on TFA, this is something which could conceivably happen, though the timespans mentioned seem to indicate that the odds of it happenning in our lifetimes are ridiculously low.
But if it were to go off, we'd have no warning. Yes, we wouldn't experience the event until 8000 years after it happenned, but since radiation travels at the speed of light, it would arrive at the same time as any visible indications. Your initial post seemed to indicate that we would see something, and then it would be another 8000 years before the radiation hits.
Your not that bright, are you? Whatever causes the beam to go off could have happenned 7999 years, 364 days ago, and we wouldn't have any idea until we see and experience it at the same time - tomorrow.
But realistically - I think the mass extinction scenario that's more likely is a Yellowstone eruption...seems like one's overdue, plus or minus perhaps tens of thousands of years. That's a lot less zeroes than this star thing.
I'm not going to lose any sleep over something some distance star does every trillion years or so.