Maybe this is news because it represents an entirely new way for banks to invest in futures? Think about how much Brian.MoynihanSucks.com might be worth in six months.
Although 4chan, 7chan, l33tsp34k and such have demonstrated that for any name that can be represented in the latin alphabet there are innumerable insulting misspellings that can get be coined.
Which does rather suggest that BOA is not very good at being clever. And if you think about it, you probably don't want to do business with a bank that thinks it is clever. (Especially if it is not as clever as it thinks it is.)
Then in this particular case I have been partially successful. However I had certainly not intended to raise a question of whether pity is warranted. Such an expression would most likely be rooted in a hubris about one's education or training, and I don't much care to feed such attitudes.
What I had hoped for was raising a question or two in the reader's mind about some of the unstated postulates of TFA. That, though, requires a willingness to entertain alternate viewpoints that is inconsistent with intellectual hubris.
I just looked at the calendar and realized that we are in the height of slashdot's Winter Silly Season. There should be no expectation of significant discourse until mid January, when all the good undergraduates are back to slogging through their 202 and 302 classes in Applied Escherian Logic and Extraction of Carollian Derivatives.
I tried to RTFA, but after the 3rd or 4th "parable" gave up on it: tl;dr.
I would appreciate it if anyone with analytical training and some skill in developing succinct expressions would tackle the material. I sense that there may be a valuable and elegant concept just a layer or two under the dross of the current presentation. But bringing that concept to the surface and expressing it properly requires the kind of trained mind that is product of a sound schooling in the liberal arts. That apparently is very rare among the mathematicians of our time.
So would one of you guys who knows how a metaphor is like a simile care to respond with a Readers Digest Condensed Version of TFA? I am sure that I am not the only/. minion who would appreciate that.
I don't know quite how to respond to parent post, since I have not yet noodled out whether it stands with Hemmingway and Eliot in upholding Huck Finn as a paragon of English virtuosity, or is siding with various public libraries that banned or abridged the book between 1885 and 1950.
What does seem germane is to point out that from around 1800 until roughly 1975, the overwhelming majority of persons on a worldwide scale who were trained to teach English were trained to impose the grammar and syntax of a foreign language-- Latin-- upon English. So in their view it was incorrect to use a double negative, to split an infinitive, and so on. It was only when Noam Chomsky's work became accepted that the English language began to free itself from all these instructional zealots who thought that it should really be Latin.
What is happening now of course is that the most commonly used form of English is moving very rapidly to the state where the phrase "pidgin English" becomes a redundancy. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Those of us interested in Internet communications do need some kind of common language, and English is a good choice, since by its very nature it is very malleable.
The rules and syntax associated with a language reflect its usage; they do not drive the process. English is changing very rapidly. Part of that change is that in common usage the rules are currently much more relaxed than they have been for a long time.
On the Internet, in many forums (the Blender forums are a good example), the Basic Rule of English Usage is that all possible spellings, choice of words, and syntax that manage to convey enough meaning that the thread of discourse is not broken are now acceptable. When a statement is encountered that is unacceptable under this general guideline, you are expected to politely request clarification.
This is a long way from the English of TS Elliot and IE Richards that I was taught. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, anyone who managed to publish to a global audience was expected to have an excellent command of English. So the reader was expected to spend time contemplating the subtleties of this particular choice of words, and this specific organization of clauses, over all the other possibilities the writer could have used. If the author used "cerulean" rather than "azure" or just "blue", you assumed that he had a reason for that, and you needed to consider what that reason might have been.
Whether you think this change is for the better or a degradation of the language is only a matter of your personal comfort. It is simply the way things are going.
Here's an interesting way of looking at the change:
Before the Internet, the intent of most users of English was to express themselves with as much precision as they could manage.
After the Internet, the intent of most users of English is to express themselves with as much ambiguity as possible while still clearly conveying their point.
The shift in focus from precise expression of core content to maximum ambiguity of peripheral content has to do with accommodating the much broader range of points of view of the readership. You want to minimize distractions that can arise from conflicting points of view by maximizing the ambiguity that blurs those possible distractions.
This shift in emphasis from maximum precision of expression to maximum retained ambiguity is beginning to enter formal English writing, such as research and business reports, news articles, etc. In ambiguity there is tolerance, and in a shrinking world where conflicting points of view are being forced into close contact, tolerance is becoming a much more important commodity than it was for our parents.
This might have made sense 20 years ago. But since that time a few things have changed:
The number of persons for whom English is a second language (ESL) is now vastly greater than the number of living native speakers of English;
most data exchange on the web involves addressing an audience that includes a large number of ESL persons, and if you think that what you have to say is important enough to publish to the world, then you should take the time to rewrite it into the common basic vocabulary with simplicity of style;
the number of written English exchanges within groups where most of the participants are more fluent in some language other than English is now larger than the amount of correspondence between native English speakers.
One of the things that is happening here is that English is currently evolving faster than any natural language has ever been forced to evolve. It is absorbing new vocabulary, new idioms, and new grammar forms at an incredible rate. "I can haz cheezburger?" is not just amusing, it is also a declaration of how flexible we need English to be as it increasingly takes on the role of the universal human language.
Rating web content by syntax markers, vocabulary, and key phrases just does not make any sense. Except maybe to the grammar nazis. But those guys have more relevance to 17th century manuscripts than they do to the cutting edge of today's English.
Something that needs to be pointed out here is that at any time there are more than one loose aggregate of individuals that calls itself Anonymous. Some of these maybe have some kind of "big fish / little fish" quasi organization, but many do not: a "leader" bubbles to the forefront because she happens to be the first to post an idea that many others share, not because she actually has any following.
Not only that, but some of the groups calling themselves Anonymous exist only for a few hours before they evaporate. Scotland Yard needs to content itself with tracking down former members of Anonymous, because for the most part, by the time they develop any leads that particular Anonymous organization is not going to exist any longer.
Hunting down Anonymous is going to be very much like an Inquisition. That is, an excellent way to purge the community of someone who speaks up too often, or is irritatingly right about what the community should not be doing, or who parts their hair the wrong way.
Actually, hunting down Anonymous is too much like an Inquisition. Scotland Yard is in constant danger of stepping over the line as they pursue this. Before this goes any further, people need to be asking Scotland Yard who is going to police the police?
It seems to me a single cause is quite likely for virtually all cases of CCD. That would fit a well-established historical pattern of environmental disruption.
Suggest re-reading Rachel Carson's book, The Silent Spring, published in 1962. It documents events remarkably similar to CCD, when aerial spraying of DDT to control mosquitoes began, and subsequently was found to be causing the widespread death of song birds. And also the presence of DDT in human breast milk, although that did not gain recognition until later. Wikipedia has a brief description of Carson's later work.
What has been found to be true time and again is that some aspect of a new technology has had immense unintended consequences on ecosystems when adopted on large scales. Such as mechanized plowing in the Plains states leading to the Dust Bowl, the proliferation of pleasure boat trailers in the USA leading to the introduction of invasive aquatic species into pristine lakes, etc.
Actually in the USA much of the farm land is in the hands of big corporations, who hire managers to run the individual acreages. For instance, Monsanto owns a number of these agribusinesses; Monsanto sells the GM seed corn they use; Monsanto buys much (often, all) of the produce; Monsanto owns the fermentation and distillery plants that produce the ethanol, which is then sold to various refineries to be added to the gasoline you buy at the pump. There are government subsidies involved in every stage. Since none of the product is going to food, the mandate of the Food and Drug Administration does not directly cover these activities and FDA enforcement is not as stringent as it maybe should be (to protect neighboring food crops, etc).
If you look at this through purely capitalistic eyes, like a Libertarian might do, the whole industry is clearly corrupt. On the materials level, the "green" calories delivered to your car's engine by this ethanol were produced by a process that uses many times that number of petro derived calories. And the economics of the industry can never operate at a profit; there are big profits made, but only through government subsidies and supports. Looking a little further, and there does not appear to be any incentive in this model for any of the players to develop more sane ways of doing business: they are pleased as punch to be on the government tit and have no intention of weaning themselves.
Parent post offers a couple of misleading statements.
Nicotine is to the neonicotinoids mentioned in TFA as the sap of the poppy flower is to heroin or oxycontin. Or your neighbors' house cats are to lions and tigers.
While there are pretty stringent controls on crops raised for food, most of the corn now grown in the USA is used to make ethanol to go in the gas tank of your car. The enforcement of standards on these crops, and I believe the standards themselves, are a lot less stringent.
I'm not a fan of pesticides but I won't deny that they increase <strikeout>food and</strikeout> crop yield.
In this case, wrt corn in the USA, pretty much only crop yield since most of the corn grown here is used to make ethanol to put in your gas tank. The cost of this is tremendous whether measured by ecological impact, or by increased use of petrochemical products (estimate of over 10+ calories petroleum burned for every 1 cal delivered to your car's engine), or by dollar cost through government subsidies.
the current cosmological theory for the origin of the universe, the "big bang" theory, was initially dismissed by the "leading scientists" of the day because (1) it was developed by a roman catholic priest and (2) it seemed too close to the "creation myth of genesis". The term "big bang" was coined by these "leading scientists" to mock the theory.
I didn't know that.
I always figured "big bang" came from another Goddess worshiper, in honor of the Greatest Orgasm Ever.
Stuxnet won't backlash on the USA or anyone other than its intended Iranian targets because it is looking for a highly specific combination of factors that would never be found anywhere else. Possibly down to a "I was sold to Iran" tag encrypted into the serial number of a chip on the Siemens controllers.
When you've got a multinational cyber strike force with the economic resources of Saudi Arabia handling the bills, and
when you are required by each of the cooperating countries to spend at least as much effort to assure that your product is completely inert everywhere other than your intended target, and
when you've got a delivery system that draws on the combined human resources of the CIA, KGB, and Mossad to get your product to the right place...
it sounds fantastic.
But hey, the idea that the SR-71 Blackbird could be built, tested, and deployed for many years before anyone knew it existed was also fantastic. All those weird cover stories about being able to shift the orbits of spy satellites whose cameras could read license plates! Wow!
Of course all of this post is just hype. Just another conspiracy theory. There is of course no way that secretive elements of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Pakistan, India, and Russia would ever get together to run a covert operation to keep Iran from becoming a nuclear threat. It would take some kind of really serious mutual concern for all those countries to cooperate in such an endeavor.
I'm kind of curious about what Stuxnet's sibling is doing. The one that has infiltrated the Iranian missile program and will somehow assure that some little thing will keep going wrong and keep them from ever gaining launch capability. I'm guessing random failures of the stabilization system that would mimic aerodynamic instabilities... that would be hard to track down if done right. And as an insurance policy, some component near the payload that would function perfectly well-- until exposed to the radiation of a nuclear warhead. Whereupon it would send a signal that would trigger some other component to do something like shut down all the engines 2 seconds after launch, assuring that the bird is dead and splattered all over its launch pad.
how on Earth would one pay for use of a botnet like this?
I understand that the USA Government can simply open a Swiss bank account for the vendor. Or pay in bullion to vendor's destination of choice.
As to how private individuals might pay for this service, I'm pretty sure that in the post Wikileaks era, instructions for that will become available in the usual locations. But first things first.
But I forgot. SL was made by Microsoft and is therefore clearly and obviously evil.
There. Now it's fixed.
Microsoft has spent the last 30 years polishing its reputation as the world's greatest institution of evil genius. It has definitely earned that reputation, and fully deserves everything that goes along with it.
Don't try to take away from Microsoft what it has worked so damned hard to obtain.
...being relatively happy with my Firefox/Adblock/Noscript bubble of sanity...
You might want to look at the BetterPrivacy Add-on as well as the above. It is a whitelist based manager of Flash cookies. Which are used by a surprising number of sites that don't use Flash in any obvious way, including Gmail.com (whose Flash cookie I allow).
Personally I don't like either of those very much. I think that Gratis, Libre Open Source Software (GLOSS) is a much better expression of the state of the art, and where Linux and everything is going.
Got a sticky IT problem? Put more GLOSS into it; make it shine.
My understanding is that the modeling software was not of sufficient quality that it could be trusted.
I would like to know more about the way in which the model's prediction of failure was communicated to BP. It would be consistent with common practices in the industry for Haliburton to go on record with a negative report while dismissing its findings off the record and urging a go-ahead behind the scenes. It is more than possible-- it is highly likely-- that Haliburton brought forth this negative report solely for the purpose of diverting blame if something went wrong.
I note that Haliburton had no trouble at all in going ahead with its part of the project despite this negative report.
He was a young man when he was involved in developing scuba gear. Before even then, he had made a name for himself in exploring reefs by free diving. He lived, in a very literal way, by applying his knowledge of fluid dynamics, the physics of gases under pressure, and human biology to what was until then an alien environment.
As a fringe benefit, much of his story is documented with wonderful photography. As a second fringe benefit, he continued to be on the forefront of oceanography for his entire life.
Too bad he doesn't fit the criteria, because he'd be a great choice for a scientific hero. But he is way too old. And he is dead.
Stuxnet was designed with such a high degree of care to avoid collateral damage that I'm betting that it was the product of a multinational effort. Undoubtedly involving the USA and Israel, but probably fronted by some other country that would be better able to take the hit from the inevitable publicity when stuff comes to light. Such as Saudi Arabia or the UAE.
I think the big questions which have yet to be asked are
what else have the producers of Stuxnet put into play that have not shown up yet, and
how much of Iran's resources are now tied up in checking that all of its other computer-dependent activities are not being messed with, and
can Iran's dangerous ambitions be contained by these kinds of sabotage?
I'm thinking that Iran's petroleum pipelines and refineries are probably wearing out very, very quickly: repeated unreported transitory fluctuations in pumping pressures will do that. HVAC systems are notoriously hard to manage just on their own: it would be easy to to introduce oscillations between winter coat chilly and tropical heat in Iran's government office buildings, which would do interesting things to productivity and morale. Stuxnet might be the first tool of subtle cyber sabotage discovered, but it is probably not the only one and may not be the most damaging one.
Slashdot Mirror
It should also be noted that the stuxnet designers went out of their way
These would not have been easy design constraints to work under. The craft that went into stuxnet is very impressive.
Maybe this is news because it represents an entirely new way for banks to invest in futures? Think about how much Brian.MoynihanSucks.com might be worth in six months.
Although 4chan, 7chan, l33tsp34k and such have demonstrated that for any name that can be represented in the latin alphabet there are innumerable insulting misspellings that can get be coined.
Which does rather suggest that BOA is not very good at being clever. And if you think about it, you probably don't want to do business with a bank that thinks it is clever. (Especially if it is not as clever as it thinks it is.)
Then in this particular case I have been partially successful. However I had certainly not intended to raise a question of whether pity is warranted. Such an expression would most likely be rooted in a hubris about one's education or training, and I don't much care to feed such attitudes.
What I had hoped for was raising a question or two in the reader's mind about some of the unstated postulates of TFA. That, though, requires a willingness to entertain alternate viewpoints that is inconsistent with intellectual hubris.
On second thought, never mind.
I just looked at the calendar and realized that we are in the height of slashdot's Winter Silly Season. There should be no expectation of significant discourse until mid January, when all the good undergraduates are back to slogging through their 202 and 302 classes in Applied Escherian Logic and Extraction of Carollian Derivatives.
WRT tfa, wtf?
I tried to RTFA, but after the 3rd or 4th "parable" gave up on it: tl;dr.
I would appreciate it if anyone with analytical training and some skill in developing succinct expressions would tackle the material. I sense that there may be a valuable and elegant concept just a layer or two under the dross of the current presentation. But bringing that concept to the surface and expressing it properly requires the kind of trained mind that is product of a sound schooling in the liberal arts. That apparently is very rare among the mathematicians of our time.
So would one of you guys who knows how a metaphor is like a simile care to respond with a Readers Digest Condensed Version of TFA? I am sure that I am not the only /. minion who would appreciate that.
To work properly, voting of any kind requires an informed populace.
Voting with your wallet is certainly not going to work on issues concerning the control of information and disinformation to the general public.
I don't know quite how to respond to parent post, since I have not yet noodled out whether it stands with Hemmingway and Eliot in upholding Huck Finn as a paragon of English virtuosity, or is siding with various public libraries that banned or abridged the book between 1885 and 1950.
What does seem germane is to point out that from around 1800 until roughly 1975, the overwhelming majority of persons on a worldwide scale who were trained to teach English were trained to impose the grammar and syntax of a foreign language-- Latin-- upon English. So in their view it was incorrect to use a double negative, to split an infinitive, and so on. It was only when Noam Chomsky's work became accepted that the English language began to free itself from all these instructional zealots who thought that it should really be Latin.
What is happening now of course is that the most commonly used form of English is moving very rapidly to the state where the phrase "pidgin English" becomes a redundancy. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Those of us interested in Internet communications do need some kind of common language, and English is a good choice, since by its very nature it is very malleable.
The rules and syntax associated with a language reflect its usage; they do not drive the process. English is changing very rapidly. Part of that change is that in common usage the rules are currently much more relaxed than they have been for a long time.
On the Internet, in many forums (the Blender forums are a good example), the Basic Rule of English Usage is that all possible spellings, choice of words, and syntax that manage to convey enough meaning that the thread of discourse is not broken are now acceptable. When a statement is encountered that is unacceptable under this general guideline, you are expected to politely request clarification.
This is a long way from the English of TS Elliot and IE Richards that I was taught. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, anyone who managed to publish to a global audience was expected to have an excellent command of English. So the reader was expected to spend time contemplating the subtleties of this particular choice of words, and this specific organization of clauses, over all the other possibilities the writer could have used. If the author used "cerulean" rather than "azure" or just "blue", you assumed that he had a reason for that, and you needed to consider what that reason might have been.
Whether you think this change is for the better or a degradation of the language is only a matter of your personal comfort. It is simply the way things are going.
Here's an interesting way of looking at the change:
The shift in focus from precise expression of core content to maximum ambiguity of peripheral content has to do with accommodating the much broader range of points of view of the readership. You want to minimize distractions that can arise from conflicting points of view by maximizing the ambiguity that blurs those possible distractions.
This shift in emphasis from maximum precision of expression to maximum retained ambiguity is beginning to enter formal English writing, such as research and business reports, news articles, etc. In ambiguity there is tolerance, and in a shrinking world where conflicting points of view are being forced into close contact, tolerance is becoming a much more important commodity than it was for our parents.
I think this approach is crap.
This might have made sense 20 years ago. But since that time a few things have changed:
One of the things that is happening here is that English is currently evolving faster than any natural language has ever been forced to evolve. It is absorbing new vocabulary, new idioms, and new grammar forms at an incredible rate. "I can haz cheezburger?" is not just amusing, it is also a declaration of how flexible we need English to be as it increasingly takes on the role of the universal human language.
Rating web content by syntax markers, vocabulary, and key phrases just does not make any sense. Except maybe to the grammar nazis. But those guys have more relevance to 17th century manuscripts than they do to the cutting edge of today's English.
Any damn fool can write "advanced" jargon: it only takes a bit of time to study some vocabulary lists to do so.
But to be able to communicate clearly and concisely in basic English-- now that takes intelligence. That is the kind of writing that is worth reading.
Of which Anonymous do you speak?
Something that needs to be pointed out here is that at any time there are more than one loose aggregate of individuals that calls itself Anonymous. Some of these maybe have some kind of "big fish / little fish" quasi organization, but many do not: a "leader" bubbles to the forefront because she happens to be the first to post an idea that many others share, not because she actually has any following.
Not only that, but some of the groups calling themselves Anonymous exist only for a few hours before they evaporate. Scotland Yard needs to content itself with tracking down former members of Anonymous, because for the most part, by the time they develop any leads that particular Anonymous organization is not going to exist any longer.
Hunting down Anonymous is going to be very much like an Inquisition. That is, an excellent way to purge the community of someone who speaks up too often, or is irritatingly right about what the community should not be doing, or who parts their hair the wrong way.
Actually, hunting down Anonymous is too much like an Inquisition. Scotland Yard is in constant danger of stepping over the line as they pursue this. Before this goes any further, people need to be asking Scotland Yard who is going to police the police?
It seems to me a single cause is quite likely for virtually all cases of CCD. That would fit a well-established historical pattern of environmental disruption.
Suggest re-reading Rachel Carson's book, The Silent Spring, published in 1962. It documents events remarkably similar to CCD, when aerial spraying of DDT to control mosquitoes began, and subsequently was found to be causing the widespread death of song birds. And also the presence of DDT in human breast milk, although that did not gain recognition until later. Wikipedia has a brief description of Carson's later work.
What has been found to be true time and again is that some aspect of a new technology has had immense unintended consequences on ecosystems when adopted on large scales. Such as mechanized plowing in the Plains states leading to the Dust Bowl, the proliferation of pleasure boat trailers in the USA leading to the introduction of invasive aquatic species into pristine lakes, etc.
Actually in the USA much of the farm land is in the hands of big corporations, who hire managers to run the individual acreages. For instance, Monsanto owns a number of these agribusinesses; Monsanto sells the GM seed corn they use; Monsanto buys much (often, all) of the produce; Monsanto owns the fermentation and distillery plants that produce the ethanol, which is then sold to various refineries to be added to the gasoline you buy at the pump. There are government subsidies involved in every stage. Since none of the product is going to food, the mandate of the Food and Drug Administration does not directly cover these activities and FDA enforcement is not as stringent as it maybe should be (to protect neighboring food crops, etc).
If you look at this through purely capitalistic eyes, like a Libertarian might do, the whole industry is clearly corrupt. On the materials level, the "green" calories delivered to your car's engine by this ethanol were produced by a process that uses many times that number of petro derived calories. And the economics of the industry can never operate at a profit; there are big profits made, but only through government subsidies and supports. Looking a little further, and there does not appear to be any incentive in this model for any of the players to develop more sane ways of doing business: they are pleased as punch to be on the government tit and have no intention of weaning themselves.
Parent post offers a couple of misleading statements.
I'm not a fan of pesticides but I won't deny that they increase <strikeout>food and</strikeout> crop yield.
In this case, wrt corn in the USA, pretty much only crop yield since most of the corn grown here is used to make ethanol to put in your gas tank. The cost of this is tremendous whether measured by ecological impact, or by increased use of petrochemical products (estimate of over 10+ calories petroleum burned for every 1 cal delivered to your car's engine), or by dollar cost through government subsidies.
the current cosmological theory for the origin of the universe, the "big bang" theory, was initially dismissed by the "leading scientists" of the day because (1) it was developed by a roman catholic priest and (2) it seemed too close to the "creation myth of genesis". The term "big bang" was coined by these "leading scientists" to mock the theory.
I didn't know that.
I always figured "big bang" came from another Goddess worshiper, in honor of the Greatest Orgasm Ever.
Those who worship the Goddess have more fun.
Stuxnet won't backlash on the USA or anyone other than its intended Iranian targets because it is looking for a highly specific combination of factors that would never be found anywhere else. Possibly down to a "I was sold to Iran" tag encrypted into the serial number of a chip on the Siemens controllers.
But hey, the idea that the SR-71 Blackbird could be built, tested, and deployed for many years before anyone knew it existed was also fantastic. All those weird cover stories about being able to shift the orbits of spy satellites whose cameras could read license plates! Wow!
Of course all of this post is just hype. Just another conspiracy theory. There is of course no way that secretive elements of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Pakistan, India, and Russia would ever get together to run a covert operation to keep Iran from becoming a nuclear threat. It would take some kind of really serious mutual concern for all those countries to cooperate in such an endeavor.
I'm kind of curious about what Stuxnet's sibling is doing. The one that has infiltrated the Iranian missile program and will somehow assure that some little thing will keep going wrong and keep them from ever gaining launch capability. I'm guessing random failures of the stabilization system that would mimic aerodynamic instabilities... that would be hard to track down if done right. And as an insurance policy, some component near the payload that would function perfectly well-- until exposed to the radiation of a nuclear warhead. Whereupon it would send a signal that would trigger some other component to do something like shut down all the engines 2 seconds after launch, assuring that the bird is dead and splattered all over its launch pad.
how on Earth would one pay for use of a botnet like this?
I understand that the USA Government can simply open a Swiss bank account for the vendor. Or pay in bullion to vendor's destination of choice.
As to how private individuals might pay for this service, I'm pretty sure that in the post Wikileaks era, instructions for that will become available in the usual locations. But first things first.
But I forgot. SL was made by Microsoft and is therefore clearly and obviously evil.
There. Now it's fixed.
Microsoft has spent the last 30 years polishing its reputation as the world's greatest institution of evil genius. It has definitely earned that reputation, and fully deserves everything that goes along with it.
Don't try to take away from Microsoft what it has worked so damned hard to obtain.
...being relatively happy with my Firefox/Adblock/Noscript bubble of sanity...
You might want to look at the BetterPrivacy Add-on as well as the above. It is a whitelist based manager of Flash cookies. Which are used by a surprising number of sites that don't use Flash in any obvious way, including Gmail.com (whose Flash cookie I allow).
BetterPrivacy for Firefox. The developer's site, with links to reviews of BetterPrivacy in half a dozen big name magazines.
TFA says "FLOSS", not "F/OSS".
Personally I don't like either of those very much. I think that Gratis, Libre Open Source Software (GLOSS) is a much better expression of the state of the art, and where Linux and everything is going.
Got a sticky IT problem? Put more GLOSS into it; make it shine.
I, too, have doubts that any l33tnik could have mustered the resources to DDOS an operation like wikileaks.
I don't have much respect for l33tniks. They are pretty much the bottom fish of the basement dwellers.
My understanding is that the modeling software was not of sufficient quality that it could be trusted.
I would like to know more about the way in which the model's prediction of failure was communicated to BP. It would be consistent with common practices in the industry for Haliburton to go on record with a negative report while dismissing its findings off the record and urging a go-ahead behind the scenes. It is more than possible-- it is highly likely-- that Haliburton brought forth this negative report solely for the purpose of diverting blame if something went wrong.
I note that Haliburton had no trouble at all in going ahead with its part of the project despite this negative report.
Jacques Cousteau.
He was a young man when he was involved in developing scuba gear. Before even then, he had made a name for himself in exploring reefs by free diving. He lived, in a very literal way, by applying his knowledge of fluid dynamics, the physics of gases under pressure, and human biology to what was until then an alien environment.
As a fringe benefit, much of his story is documented with wonderful photography. As a second fringe benefit, he continued to be on the forefront of oceanography for his entire life.
Too bad he doesn't fit the criteria, because he'd be a great choice for a scientific hero. But he is way too old. And he is dead.
Stuxnet was designed with such a high degree of care to avoid collateral damage that I'm betting that it was the product of a multinational effort. Undoubtedly involving the USA and Israel, but probably fronted by some other country that would be better able to take the hit from the inevitable publicity when stuff comes to light. Such as Saudi Arabia or the UAE.
I think the big questions which have yet to be asked are
I'm thinking that Iran's petroleum pipelines and refineries are probably wearing out very, very quickly: repeated unreported transitory fluctuations in pumping pressures will do that. HVAC systems are notoriously hard to manage just on their own: it would be easy to to introduce oscillations between winter coat chilly and tropical heat in Iran's government office buildings, which would do interesting things to productivity and morale. Stuxnet might be the first tool of subtle cyber sabotage discovered, but it is probably not the only one and may not be the most damaging one.