Of course not! Execution is for confessed and convicted criminals of the lowest order. Those who are merely dishonored are permitted to commit seppuku and thus restore their honor.
Let us know when a smartphone gets 640k seconds - just over a week - of real operation[*] out of one battery charge. It would be an enormous improvement over today, whether or not people would agree that it would be enough.
[*] Not just the fictional standby-only time, but with a couple of hours per day spent making calls, accessing internet, taking photos, watching video, and so forth.
They say self-driving cars will be here within just five years, and that the tech to do so is available already
I refuse to believe THAT one until I see one driving around Nevada with a Google sticker on it.
And I refuse to believe it until they are driving around Finland (or Maine or Ontario) in the winter.
The road surface may be black ice, slush above ice, slush above tarmac, dry ice, soft snow, packed snow, or bare, covering a few orders of magnitude in coefficient of friction and steering/braking response. Roads can be locally impassable due to snowdrifts, or two lanes may be constricted to one from sheer quantity of snow over some distance. And road markings and road edges can be completely invisible under snow or ice. Despite what wikipedia says, "cats eyes" are not used on roads where severe cold is expected - they'd be removed along with their "steel protectors" by a typical snowplough in Finland.
The Google car detects motorcycles that lane split and doesn't side-swipe them on their way by. Sebastian Thrun addressed this concern in his keynote talk at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference two weeks ago in Rhode Island.
Indeed. It's necessary for one of the occupants of the driverless car to side-swipe the biker with the door. Probably makes it easier, too...
Just for comparison, from how many countries are users allowed to submit from to the Ubuntu Software Center?
All of them, including those which are not generally recognized (Somaliland, etc.) as independent states, provided they have an internet connection.
BTW, your question (a bit tongue-in-cheek) is just as newsworthy as TFA. Which is to say, not newsworthy at all.
Slashdot has descended too far down the slippery slope of perdition, and continues to plummet at a depressing speed. In days of yore, commercial propaganda stuff like this "story" would have been stopped in the firehose as binspam.
you won't be able to tell the difference between a gesticulating drunken bum, and a drunken, gesticulating businessman
I've never been able to tell the difference. What is it?
The typical drunk bum has a better idea what he's talking about than most businessmen (drunk or sober).
Perhaps this is just affecting some kernel versions or specific applications which behave poorly.
One data point: both of my servers were running all night, with NTP updates, and did not appear to have any issues. Both are still running right now, several hours after the leap second. They're Synology boxes running their own version of Linux (DSM 3.1-1636 and DSM 4.0-2196). FWIW, the box running DSM 3.1 has never had a problem with leap seconds, and has endured several since we've had it running almost continuously[*] since 2007. Our desktop systems were not running because everyone was in bed, but those that have been used this morning were fine (Xubuntu 12.04, both the i386 and amd64 flavors).
[*] Since late 2007, it has been rebooted a few times for updates to the DSM system, once for upgrading its internal disks, and has been taken down several times when the length of a power outage exceeded 10 minutes, as our pathetic UPS will only keep the servers running for about 30 minutes. We're in a rural area, so the power is quite dodgy, especially in summer thunderstorms.
The problem with that is... they don't get the binaries, they can't try out the software and learn how good it is.
Sure they can.
They can compile it their own damn selves.
I'm glad we're not talking about distribution of the compiler, then.
Imagine if it had some weirdness which only allowed it to be compiled by itself...
There are some things that need to be added to this.
1) Browser history clearing should not be necessary. If a browser leaks history information that is a vulnerability that needs to be addressed. But I've found the ability to search the history very valuable and it isn't something you'd want to deprive yourself of.
Actually, it's still best to clear out your history regularly. The old methods for a web site to trawl through it using Javascript and CSS exploits (tested in the browserspy.dk site I linked to) don't work with relatively modern browsers, but this method does.
4) It doesn't matter if you can view the cookies you have. Most of the time they're filled with seemingly gibberish. If you can't read them, they're still secret. But remove them and the site stops working.
I remove my cookies regularly (all of them), and they are always deleted when the browser exits. Sites don't "stop working"; at most, you have to log in again the next time you visit. However, this should be the default (as it is for banking sites and for making purchases at reputable sites), and not the "keep me logged in so I can forget my userID and password" option that is preferred by those who don't know or don't care about how easily they can be tracked.
Some of your other points are partly valid (the parts alluded to in my post), but there is much that you got wrong, also. For example, I don't use any of my browsers maximized on any of our Linux PCs at home or on the Windows PC at work, and have never encountered a website which required my browser to be maximized. Are you perhaps using a screen with an insufficient resolution, and making an unsupportable generalization therefrom?
They engage in war to gain control of the natural resources the other country has.
The distinction is subtle, but significant.
Tell us again what natural resources the US wished to control when it engaged in war against Grenada in 1983, or when it engaged in war against Panama in 1989, or when it engaged in war against Afghanistan starting in 2001.
There are many reasons for one state to go to war against another. Gaining control of natural resources is only one (e.g. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait), and is not the commonest.
Well, he could have mentioned the interesting fact that the linked SecurityWeek article claims "As for the industry comparison, baking finished on top with an average of 17 vulnerabilities, while retail remained on the bottom with 121."
Always knew you could trust a baker...
Bankers were probably lumped in with retail and the other bottom-feeders.
when the locked-down computer/device prevents you from seeing them?
Not sure if that's what's going on here - but being plain-text does not necessarily mean readable. I don't know how to see/read cookies on my ebook reader, for example.
A good argument for knowing something about how your device works. I don't have an e-Reader, so don't know whether it's even possible to clear cookies (maybe they're needed to maintain access to purchased ebooks). Anyway, this whole rigmarole strongly reinforces Eben Moglen's recent suggestion. The spying behavior of locked-down devices is making his case very clearly.
On a PC (not yet locked-down by UEFI), it's not sufficient just to clear cookies and LSOs. We have Opera set to delete its entire cache as well when you exit, and the kids know to clear their browsing history regularly (curious how quickly they learned that one). Firefox is also set to clear its cache and browsing history automatically on exit. On Chromium and Chrome, it's necessary to manually clear the entire cache and browsing history.
FWIW, this site will tell you what can be discerned from your browser just visiting a page. It's likely to increase your paranoia level a bit, especially when this site tells you just how unique your browser is. Ours all appear to be unique, probably largely due to the installed fonts and plugins.
Has anyone else noticed the appalling sensationalism in headlines these days? Slashdot is in danger of becoming just another gutter-press gossip site.
So why does Adobe hate Windows so much? Is it some kind of evil plan for sabotage that they're going to keep supporting Flash on Windows?
My guess is they're in cahoots with the malware suppliers who rely on Flash. These must have grown tired of trying to find easy ways into Linux, Android, or iOS, and want to limit their future efforts to the low-hanging fruits in Windows (and maybe OSX).
Centuries later, scientists figure out what actually happened using careful observation. Number of times this has happened: too many to count.
And most of these "observations" of weird stuff in the night sky were due to the aurorae. Even in modern light-polluted England where the telly rules the evenings, some people will always spot a decent aurora. Here are examples from England and Scotland, which are nothing compared to those visible at higher geomagnetic latitudes.
Personally, while the idea of my browsing data being logged anywhere does not fill me with joy, the idea of the U.S. government having access to it...
What leap of logic could possibly lead people to believe that just because the server is in the US that the US Feds have access to it, or even care?
One of the provisions of the Patriot Act gives the US government access to all data stored within the US on request. Essentially unlimited access can be granted in secret, and the request for access and the reasoning behind the request can be kept secret.
Wow! I've heard of trolls that write like they're 5, but never of one that writes like they're in-utero. Kudos, sir! You have raised the bar for everybody!
Or lowered it to the floor, for the would-be limbo dancers.
Of course, it could have been Balmer. What else can he do for amusement on a non-monkey-dancing non-chair-throwing day?
In vacuum, or in the almost-like-vacuum kind of atmosphere that Mars has, losing pressure means losing consciousness within ten seconds or so. Not much time for pain, I'd say.
Have you asked anyone who was nearly asphyxiated about the brevity and painlessness of their experience, and the extent to which they were aware of it? Consciousness and discomfort will persist a lot longer than 10 seconds. The near vacuum outside your skin on Mars is essentially irrelevant, and would greatly diminish the effect of the low temperature.
Here's a quick experiment you can do at home (but don't overdo it, obviously). Breathe out fully, and don't breathe in again for a while. Even without any special preparation, a fit person can hold out longer than 10 seconds before having to breathe in again, with their consciousness quite intact. I can easily get well past 10 seconds and I'm mid-50ish and not particularly athletic.
You may be interested in the book Canticle for Leibowitz. Not the same way of getting into that dark age, but the same idea none the less. A fun read.
A book of its era (cold war fearmongering), and which relies on a number of mythological/nonsensical elements in its message. And it does not address GP's point at all, since it utterly fails to distinguish between mythology and religion.
Slashdot Mirror
or do they execute retard kids for being teens?
Of course not! Execution is for confessed and convicted criminals of the lowest order. Those who are merely dishonored are permitted to commit seppuku and thus restore their honor.
Oh wait, that's a Microsoft Product.
Actually, NT sounds just like "en tee" = "I don't work" or "I won't do it" in Finnish.
BTW, this is not a joke, either.
640 seconds should be enough for everyone.
Let us know when a smartphone gets 640k seconds - just over a week - of real operation[*] out of one battery charge. It would be an enormous improvement over today, whether or not people would agree that it would be enough.
[*] Not just the fictional standby-only time, but with a couple of hours per day spent making calls, accessing internet, taking photos, watching video, and so forth.
They say self-driving cars will be here within just five years, and that the tech to do so is available already
I refuse to believe THAT one until I see one driving around Nevada with a Google sticker on it.
And I refuse to believe it until they are driving around Finland (or Maine or Ontario) in the winter.
The road surface may be black ice, slush above ice, slush above tarmac, dry ice, soft snow, packed snow, or bare, covering a few orders of magnitude in coefficient of friction and steering/braking response. Roads can be locally impassable due to snowdrifts, or two lanes may be constricted to one from sheer quantity of snow over some distance. And road markings and road edges can be completely invisible under snow or ice. Despite what wikipedia says, "cats eyes" are not used on roads where severe cold is expected - they'd be removed along with their "steel protectors" by a typical snowplough in Finland.
The Google car detects motorcycles that lane split and doesn't side-swipe them on their way by. Sebastian Thrun addressed this concern in his keynote talk at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference two weeks ago in Rhode Island.
Indeed. It's necessary for one of the occupants of the driverless car to side-swipe the biker with the door. Probably makes it easier, too...
Just for comparison, from how many countries are users allowed to submit from to the Ubuntu Software Center?
All of them, including those which are not generally recognized (Somaliland, etc.) as independent states, provided they have an internet connection.
BTW, your question (a bit tongue-in-cheek) is just as newsworthy as TFA. Which is to say, not newsworthy at all.
Slashdot has descended too far down the slippery slope of perdition, and continues to plummet at a depressing speed. In days of yore, commercial propaganda stuff like this "story" would have been stopped in the firehose as binspam.
you won't be able to tell the difference between a gesticulating drunken bum, and a drunken, gesticulating businessman
I've never been able to tell the difference. What is it?
The typical drunk bum has a better idea what he's talking about than most businessmen (drunk or sober).
Yeah, it's a shame that we still have no implanted clock which communicates the current time directly to our brain.
Uh, can we disable this thing for the end of June and the end of December? Being kicked in the head by a leap second might feel somewhat unpleasant...
Perhaps this is just affecting some kernel versions or specific applications which behave poorly.
One data point: both of my servers were running all night, with NTP updates, and did not appear to have any issues. Both are still running right now, several hours after the leap second. They're Synology boxes running their own version of Linux (DSM 3.1-1636 and DSM 4.0-2196). FWIW, the box running DSM 3.1 has never had a problem with leap seconds, and has endured several since we've had it running almost continuously[*] since 2007. Our desktop systems were not running because everyone was in bed, but those that have been used this morning were fine (Xubuntu 12.04, both the i386 and amd64 flavors).
[*] Since late 2007, it has been rebooted a few times for updates to the DSM system, once for upgrading its internal disks, and has been taken down several times when the length of a power outage exceeded 10 minutes, as our pathetic UPS will only keep the servers running for about 30 minutes. We're in a rural area, so the power is quite dodgy, especially in summer thunderstorms.
The problem with that is... they don't get the binaries, they can't try out the software and learn how good it is.
Sure they can.
They can compile it their own damn selves.
I'm glad we're not talking about distribution of the compiler, then.
Imagine if it had some weirdness which only allowed it to be compiled by itself...
There are some things that need to be added to this.
1) Browser history clearing should not be necessary. If a browser leaks history information that is a vulnerability that needs to be addressed. But I've found the ability to search the history very valuable and it isn't something you'd want to deprive yourself of.
Actually, it's still best to clear out your history regularly. The old methods for a web site to trawl through it using Javascript and CSS exploits (tested in the browserspy.dk site I linked to) don't work with relatively modern browsers, but this method does.
4) It doesn't matter if you can view the cookies you have. Most of the time they're filled with seemingly gibberish. If you can't read them, they're still secret. But remove them and the site stops working.
I remove my cookies regularly (all of them), and they are always deleted when the browser exits. Sites don't "stop working"; at most, you have to log in again the next time you visit. However, this should be the default (as it is for banking sites and for making purchases at reputable sites), and not the "keep me logged in so I can forget my userID and password" option that is preferred by those who don't know or don't care about how easily they can be tracked.
Some of your other points are partly valid (the parts alluded to in my post), but there is much that you got wrong, also. For example, I don't use any of my browsers maximized on any of our Linux PCs at home or on the Windows PC at work, and have never encountered a website which required my browser to be maximized. Are you perhaps using a screen with an insufficient resolution, and making an unsupportable generalization therefrom?
They engage in war to gain control of the natural resources the other country has.
The distinction is subtle, but significant.
Tell us again what natural resources the US wished to control when it engaged in war against Grenada in 1983, or when it engaged in war against Panama in 1989, or when it engaged in war against Afghanistan starting in 2001.
There are many reasons for one state to go to war against another. Gaining control of natural resources is only one (e.g. Iraq's invasion of Kuwait), and is not the commonest.
Well, he could have mentioned the interesting fact that the linked SecurityWeek article claims "As for the industry comparison, baking finished on top with an average of 17 vulnerabilities, while retail remained on the bottom with 121."
Always knew you could trust a baker...
Bankers were probably lumped in with retail and the other bottom-feeders.
when the locked-down computer/device prevents you from seeing them?
Not sure if that's what's going on here - but being plain-text does not necessarily mean readable. I don't know how to see/read cookies on my ebook reader, for example.
A good argument for knowing something about how your device works. I don't have an e-Reader, so don't know whether it's even possible to clear cookies (maybe they're needed to maintain access to purchased ebooks). Anyway, this whole rigmarole strongly reinforces Eben Moglen's recent suggestion. The spying behavior of locked-down devices is making his case very clearly.
On a PC (not yet locked-down by UEFI), it's not sufficient just to clear cookies and LSOs. We have Opera set to delete its entire cache as well when you exit, and the kids know to clear their browsing history regularly (curious how quickly they learned that one). Firefox is also set to clear its cache and browsing history automatically on exit. On Chromium and Chrome, it's necessary to manually clear the entire cache and browsing history.
FWIW, this site will tell you what can be discerned from your browser just visiting a page. It's likely to increase your paranoia level a bit, especially when this site tells you just how unique your browser is. Ours all appear to be unique, probably largely due to the installed fonts and plugins.
Has anyone else noticed the appalling sensationalism in headlines these days? Slashdot is in danger of becoming just another gutter-press gossip site.
An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas, más é do thoil é?
Níl. Agus ghlanadh suas do praiseach ina dhiaidh sin.
So why does Adobe hate Windows so much? Is it some kind of evil plan for sabotage that they're going to keep supporting Flash on Windows?
My guess is they're in cahoots with the malware suppliers who rely on Flash. These must have grown tired of trying to find easy ways into Linux, Android, or iOS, and want to limit their future efforts to the low-hanging fruits in Windows (and maybe OSX).
Have you seen how much that costs?
StartSSL provides class 1 certificates at no cost!
Which might be way beyond GP's budget. Anyway, StartSSL's server appears to be down (slashdotted?).
Centuries later, scientists figure out what actually happened using careful observation. Number of times this has happened: too many to count.
And most of these "observations" of weird stuff in the night sky were due to the aurorae. Even in modern light-polluted England where the telly rules the evenings, some people will always spot a decent aurora. Here are examples from England and Scotland, which are nothing compared to those visible at higher geomagnetic latitudes.
"Helen Winkelmann Arrested on Rape Charge"
But did she want a condom or not? Confusing...
At last, a public opinion poll that gets the opinions of ordinary Americans on the issues that matter!
But who could possibly defend us from such morons?
That's an immediate concern far greater than for alien/zombie/vampire/deity invasions.
Personally, while the idea of my browsing data being logged anywhere does not fill me with joy, the idea of the U.S. government having access to it...
What leap of logic could possibly lead people to believe that just because the server is in the US that the US Feds have access to it, or even care?
One of the provisions of the Patriot Act gives the US government access to all data stored within the US on request. Essentially unlimited access can be granted in secret, and the request for access and the reasoning behind the request can be kept secret.
Wow! I've heard of trolls that write like they're 5, but never of one that writes like they're in-utero. Kudos, sir! You have raised the bar for everybody!
Or lowered it to the floor, for the would-be limbo dancers.
Of course, it could have been Balmer. What else can he do for amusement on a non-monkey-dancing non-chair-throwing day?
"Asimov was writing about physical harm. "
No, he was not.
Read 'Liar!' or 'Reason' for example.
Or "Satisfaction guaranteed", as yet another example.
In vacuum, or in the almost-like-vacuum kind of atmosphere that Mars has, losing pressure means losing consciousness within ten seconds or so. Not much time for pain, I'd say.
Have you asked anyone who was nearly asphyxiated about the brevity and painlessness of their experience, and the extent to which they were aware of it? Consciousness and discomfort will persist a lot longer than 10 seconds. The near vacuum outside your skin on Mars is essentially irrelevant, and would greatly diminish the effect of the low temperature.
Here's a quick experiment you can do at home (but don't overdo it, obviously). Breathe out fully, and don't breathe in again for a while. Even without any special preparation, a fit person can hold out longer than 10 seconds before having to breathe in again, with their consciousness quite intact. I can easily get well past 10 seconds and I'm mid-50ish and not particularly athletic.
You may be interested in the book Canticle for Leibowitz. Not the same way of getting into that dark age, but the same idea none the less. A fun read.
A book of its era (cold war fearmongering), and which relies on a number of mythological/nonsensical elements in its message. And it does not address GP's point at all, since it utterly fails to distinguish between mythology and religion.