That's why I'm not on Facebook. As the people who don't have an account decrease the data associated with those people will become more and more valuable until they're willing to pay big money to find out who won't use them and why, then I cash in. OK, it's vastly unlikely to happen, but I'll be gambling on exactly the same thing as the investors, and from a no-lose situation.
And watch the share price of optical fibre manufacturers shoot up. Long thin bits of wire are bad news in the long term, especially with such a huge (if weak) magnetic field and a star that likes to slap it about occasionally. I thought we got that with the whole Carrington Event and the telegraph system? We can't keep messing about for another fifty years, we need an EM-proof(ish) replacement for LongBitsOfWire (TM).
I don't simply dislike MS on principle, there's a few good reasons. Shifty market practices, bloated and unnecessary software, security issues everywhere, slow to innovate...I could go on. But believe it or not I'd rather like MS. If getting a few engineers a bit higher up in the system improves things in even the tiniest way then good. Cynically, I don't think it will, but here's hoping.
Does anyone know if the US defence dept are still using a cluster of PS3s as a supercomputer? No I realise they'd never be so daft as to connect the cluster to the interwebs, and so never had the other-OS feature removed, but I'll bet there's somebody on the project who's looked into the option of cracking it...
The problem is that anonymous are precisely the same as a totally different group called synonymous. The idea is that anonymous distract attention from synonymous who do the real work, which is identical to that of anonymous. There is currently a large UK secret service project dealing with the issues, codenamed antonymous.
Very probably being used in Egypt as I type - when ADSL is taken down you need an old school modem, and I bet at least one person has had to dig out the old rubber cup version.
Hey! Are you Facebook?! Would you like to make $$$?! Well do I have a business opportunity for you! I don't have a Facebook account, and never have, but a recent legal decision values my information (if converted into a Facebook account) at over eighty thousand dollars!!!
Due to a cashflow situation I'm willing to sign up to Facebook and you will receive 20% of the value!!! That's right, just send me $80,000 and I'll sign right up, and then send you $16,000!!!!
Everyone's a winner!
(Please note, GoldmanSachs and all other investors in spurious semi-legal Ponzi schemes....the above isn't really even satire, it's a good example of why the entire system is so screwed up. And no, it's not actually a real offer. Go on, offer me $80k to sign up to Facebook and see what happens)
LOIC was hosted on SourceForge. Five people were arrested in the UK today for (from the looks of it) using it. I'm not inferring anything, if I did it would be conspiracy theory...I'm just curious as to whether the events are unrelated?
I'd counter with the hypothetical world where a US president loses his job, millions of Americans somehow lose the right to bear arms, China is forced to back down from utterly totalitarian home rule, resulting in more food for its citizens and somehow, just somehow, nobody nukes anybody. If the lives of the majority improve, and a few hundred politicians resign in humiliation, then it's still a success of diplomacy. Diplomacy in strict terms is finding the best case, and it doesn't exclude Spock's "needs of the many" argument. Hell, US law recognises that one.
More technically, this is a site where the readers get to vote stories in. Yes, there are editors, but they're generally just following whatever flow the rest of us send their way. If the site is full of MS shills then pro-MS stories will get to the top, we'll all bitch about them and they'll spend more and more money trying to engineer a site full of people who never send them money anyway. I don't really care about Microsoft anymore. Friends and relatives are slowly getting used to the idea that yes, I'm some kind of computer whizz in their eyes, but no, I don't do support for commercial software. If you want to buy it then you should be pestering the people you gave the money for, the people who don't pay me. They're slowly starting to realise what value for money actually is.
Good question, especially when you're me, a skeptic with a physics background, who lives with two ghost tour guides, one an atheist and the other a believer, who both swear blind that weird things happen.
Yup, cold spots are a common occurrence. If I have to guess at a potential mechanism for the phenomena, then I'd suggest that it's heat flowing out of the area and concentrating on one spot to produce some kind of artefact that we call a ghost. Presuming that ghosts have an information content, then it's not a stupid idea, it's just a matter of entropy. Life is very good at temporarily reversing entropy, it's kind of a defining feature.
Personally I'd take several bars of metal of varying SHC, embedded with thermocouples. If there is a swing in temperature, it'll be interesting to see how much power is behind the swing, which the varying SHC will let you work out.
You work in the business? Then tell everyone you know that the geeks not only think this way of working is a bad idea (see below), but that a small subset of them are going to take advantage to the point where your systems collapse. We're seeing the start of that already.
You've, collectively and as a worldwide organisation, agreed that data is worth a huge amount of money, which doesn't exist and may pop in and out of existence. You've created a metastable chaotic system governed by belief. You've put that system on the internet. You're funding it with everybody's bank accounts and pension funds. You're idiots, and so are those who allow it...the voters and the parties and the regulatory framework. The system is unstable, stop perturbing it.
And all of that is, of course, nonsense, because there's profit to be had.
The measles vaccine doesn't stop you getting measles. It primes the immune system so when you do catch it you have a bunch of spots and a mild fever. Without it, measles can be very, very nasty...frequently life threatening.
Just coming up with a random song reference doesn't do this justice. Neither does re-writing the song. Doing both, in PHP (with a ~20% saving on characters) is the only possible respectful post I can think of. Well done sir, good effort.<br><br>
<?php // "A Double Eclipse Is Quite Smart" by Geoff Robbins// // (Badly optimised PHP version)// // With heartfelt apologies to Steinman and Tyler// // For Thierry Legault http://www.astrophotographie.fr/eclipse110104_solar_transit.html//
$short_turn="Orbiting, every now and then I get a little bit "; $rabbits="Turnaround bright eyes"; $longturn="$rabbits, Patrick Moore is just the start..."; $need="And the sky "; $forever="Monsieur Legault's quite bright<br>"; $time="Once upon a time"; $eclipse="That double eclipse is quite smart<br>";
$v1=array("curious when you line up<br>", "tired of listening to astrology shit<br>", "nervous that we won't see all the sci-fi ideas<br>", "terrified and then I see the look in your eyes<br>");
for ($i=0;$i<4;$i++){echo $short_turn.$v1[$i];} echo "$longturn<br>$longturn<br><br>";
$v2=array("restless and a dream that's quite insane<br>", "helpless and I've got an idea that won't die<br>", "angry and I know I've got to get on a plane<br>", "terrified but then I see credit card bill<br>");
for ($i=0;$i<4;$i++){echo $short_turn.$v2[$i];} echo "<br>$longturn<br>$longturn<br><br>";
$chorus="$need is out tonight<br> $need will always be there<br> And because of the speed of light<br> None of it is actually there<br> And none of it's particularly bright<br> Except for random occultations<br> On the face of the Sun<br> The ISS a shadow on me as the Earth turns<br><br> I'll take a damn good pic while standing in the dark<br> We're living on a spaceship that's made out of quarks<br> I'm pushing rhymes tonight<br> $forever$forever<br> $time I was falling in love<br> But now I'm only falling apart<br> There's nothing I can do<br> $eclipse $time there was light in my life<br> But now there's only love in the dark<br> Nothing I can say<br> $eclipse<br>";
Well, yes, that's why you don't own it: it's theirs.
Point is, a lot of the bigger telescopes provide far more data than can be handled by dedicated computing. This has been the case since CCDs were invented decades ago, there's just too much to analyse everything within the budget, so they go for the obvious/important/cheap signals (delete as applicable).
SETI started distributed computing in a big way, and this is a similar (if far more individually clever) application. It's very muck akin to the way volunteers sometimes sift through spoil on an archaeological dig just in case anything interesting has been missed by the JCBs and WHSs. Good on the guy, it's a fair old achievement and a hobby I aspire to matching.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I'm tagging it 'dontfeedthetroll', doing the same to other flamebait articles and making no comments after this one.
That's why I'm not on Facebook. As the people who don't have an account decrease the data associated with those people will become more and more valuable until they're willing to pay big money to find out who won't use them and why, then I cash in. OK, it's vastly unlikely to happen, but I'll be gambling on exactly the same thing as the investors, and from a no-lose situation.
And watch the share price of optical fibre manufacturers shoot up. Long thin bits of wire are bad news in the long term, especially with such a huge (if weak) magnetic field and a star that likes to slap it about occasionally. I thought we got that with the whole Carrington Event and the telegraph system? We can't keep messing about for another fifty years, we need an EM-proof(ish) replacement for LongBitsOfWire (TM).
Yup, they can just use one of the backup moon flags from the Apollo program.
I don't simply dislike MS on principle, there's a few good reasons. Shifty market practices, bloated and unnecessary software, security issues everywhere, slow to innovate...I could go on. But believe it or not I'd rather like MS. If getting a few engineers a bit higher up in the system improves things in even the tiniest way then good. Cynically, I don't think it will, but here's hoping.
Does anyone know if the US defence dept are still using a cluster of PS3s as a supercomputer? No I realise they'd never be so daft as to connect the cluster to the interwebs, and so never had the other-OS feature removed, but I'll bet there's somebody on the project who's looked into the option of cracking it...
The problem is that anonymous are precisely the same as a totally different group called synonymous. The idea is that anonymous distract attention from synonymous who do the real work, which is identical to that of anonymous. There is currently a large UK secret service project dealing with the issues, codenamed antonymous.
For every /. there's an xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/277/
It's already in use - arrays of mirrors all pointing at a tower. The heat melts salt (which requires 538C minimum) which is then used to power steam generators.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_thermal_energy#Power_tower_designs
Just wait until they discover seas of crude oil.
You clearly haven't been to any BDSM dungeon parties recently. To be fair, neither have I, but I can't imagine there's nobody using them any more.
Very probably being used in Egypt as I type - when ADSL is taken down you need an old school modem, and I bet at least one person has had to dig out the old rubber cup version.
And how to spell it in a headline.
So why aren't we all phoning a random number in Egypt once a day and asking if there's anything they want us to put on the interwebs for them?
Hey! Are you Facebook?! Would you like to make $$$?! Well do I have a business opportunity for you! I don't have a Facebook account, and never have, but a recent legal decision values my information (if converted into a Facebook account) at over eighty thousand dollars!!!
Due to a cashflow situation I'm willing to sign up to Facebook and you will receive 20% of the value!!! That's right, just send me $80,000 and I'll sign right up, and then send you $16,000!!!!
Everyone's a winner!
(Please note, GoldmanSachs and all other investors in spurious semi-legal Ponzi schemes....the above isn't really even satire, it's a good example of why the entire system is so screwed up. And no, it's not actually a real offer. Go on, offer me $80k to sign up to Facebook and see what happens)
LOIC was hosted on SourceForge. Five people were arrested in the UK today for (from the looks of it) using it. I'm not inferring anything, if I did it would be conspiracy theory...I'm just curious as to whether the events are unrelated?
I'd counter with the hypothetical world where a US president loses his job, millions of Americans somehow lose the right to bear arms, China is forced to back down from utterly totalitarian home rule, resulting in more food for its citizens and somehow, just somehow, nobody nukes anybody. If the lives of the majority improve, and a few hundred politicians resign in humiliation, then it's still a success of diplomacy. Diplomacy in strict terms is finding the best case, and it doesn't exclude Spock's "needs of the many" argument. Hell, US law recognises that one.
More technically, this is a site where the readers get to vote stories in. Yes, there are editors, but they're generally just following whatever flow the rest of us send their way. If the site is full of MS shills then pro-MS stories will get to the top, we'll all bitch about them and they'll spend more and more money trying to engineer a site full of people who never send them money anyway. I don't really care about Microsoft anymore. Friends and relatives are slowly getting used to the idea that yes, I'm some kind of computer whizz in their eyes, but no, I don't do support for commercial software. If you want to buy it then you should be pestering the people you gave the money for, the people who don't pay me. They're slowly starting to realise what value for money actually is.
Suggesting it "failed" suggests that there is only one possible outcome, and it's the one you want. And that's not diplomacy.
Good question, especially when you're me, a skeptic with a physics background, who lives with two ghost tour guides, one an atheist and the other a believer, who both swear blind that weird things happen.
Yup, cold spots are a common occurrence. If I have to guess at a potential mechanism for the phenomena, then I'd suggest that it's heat flowing out of the area and concentrating on one spot to produce some kind of artefact that we call a ghost. Presuming that ghosts have an information content, then it's not a stupid idea, it's just a matter of entropy. Life is very good at temporarily reversing entropy, it's kind of a defining feature.
Personally I'd take several bars of metal of varying SHC, embedded with thermocouples. If there is a swing in temperature, it'll be interesting to see how much power is behind the swing, which the varying SHC will let you work out.
You work in the business? Then tell everyone you know that the geeks not only think this way of working is a bad idea (see below), but that a small subset of them are going to take advantage to the point where your systems collapse. We're seeing the start of that already.
You've, collectively and as a worldwide organisation, agreed that data is worth a huge amount of money, which doesn't exist and may pop in and out of existence. You've created a metastable chaotic system governed by belief. You've put that system on the internet. You're funding it with everybody's bank accounts and pension funds. You're idiots, and so are those who allow it...the voters and the parties and the regulatory framework. The system is unstable, stop perturbing it.
And all of that is, of course, nonsense, because there's profit to be had.
The measles vaccine doesn't stop you getting measles. It primes the immune system so when you do catch it you have a bunch of spots and a mild fever. Without it, measles can be very, very nasty...frequently life threatening.
Just coming up with a random song reference doesn't do this justice. Neither does re-writing the song. Doing both, in PHP (with a ~20% saving on characters) is the only possible respectful post I can think of. Well done sir, good effort.<br><br>
// // // //
<?php
// "A Double Eclipse Is Quite Smart" by Geoff Robbins
// (Badly optimised PHP version)
// With heartfelt apologies to Steinman and Tyler
// For Thierry Legault http://www.astrophotographie.fr/eclipse110104_solar_transit.html
$short_turn="Orbiting, every now and then I get a little bit ";
$rabbits="Turnaround bright eyes";
$longturn="$rabbits, Patrick Moore is just the start...";
$need="And the sky ";
$forever="Monsieur Legault's quite bright<br>";
$time="Once upon a time";
$eclipse="That double eclipse is quite smart<br>";
$v1=array("curious when you line up<br>",
"tired of listening to astrology shit<br>",
"nervous that we won't see all the sci-fi ideas<br>",
"terrified and then I see the look in your eyes<br>");
for ($i=0;$i<4;$i++){echo $short_turn.$v1[$i];}
echo "$longturn<br>$longturn<br><br>";
$v2=array("restless and a dream that's quite insane<br>",
"helpless and I've got an idea that won't die<br>",
"angry and I know I've got to get on a plane<br>",
"terrified but then I see credit card bill<br>");
for ($i=0;$i<4;$i++){echo $short_turn.$v2[$i];}
echo "<br>$longturn<br>$longturn<br><br>";
$chorus="$need is out tonight<br>
$need will always be there<br>
And because of the speed of light<br>
None of it is actually there<br>
And none of it's particularly bright<br>
Except for random occultations<br>
On the face of the Sun<br>
The ISS a shadow on me as the Earth turns<br><br>
I'll take a damn good pic while standing in the dark<br>
We're living on a spaceship that's made out of quarks<br>
I'm pushing rhymes tonight<br>
$forever$forever<br>
$time I was falling in love<br>
But now I'm only falling apart<br>
There's nothing I can do<br>
$eclipse
$time there was light in my life<br>
But now there's only love in the dark<br>
Nothing I can say<br>
$eclipse<br>";
echo "$chorus<br>";
?>
Well, yes, that's why you don't own it: it's theirs.
Point is, a lot of the bigger telescopes provide far more data than can be handled by dedicated computing. This has been the case since CCDs were invented decades ago, there's just too much to analyse everything within the budget, so they go for the obvious/important/cheap signals (delete as applicable).
SETI started distributed computing in a big way, and this is a similar (if far more individually clever) application. It's very muck akin to the way volunteers sometimes sift through spoil on an archaeological dig just in case anything interesting has been missed by the JCBs and WHSs. Good on the guy, it's a fair old achievement and a hobby I aspire to matching.
That is indeed the interesting bit.
Now, in entirely different and offtopic matters, can somebody remind me exactly what constitutes a Ponzi scheme?