And interestingly all those items you mention can be picked up by the good old metal detector. No groping needed, just a good metal detector, and if the alarm sounds a manual detector to see where the offending object, followed by a check on what that is. That check can be as simply as the passenger showing the object. Still makes me wonder why they decommissioned such a simple and effective device.
Most airports have a single secure area that is shared by all airliners. To get in there, all passengers go through the same entrance(s), regardless of which airline they're flying. Individual airlines have nothing to say there.
Even where security checks are done when entering the gate it's usually the airport that makes these arrangements, if only because the gates are usually shared. It's rare for an airline to have it's dedicated gates, let along it's dedicated airport (or dedicated part/terminal).
With touch pads I always have the problem that while typing some document or so I accidentally touch it and then the cursor jumps to another part of the document. Very irritating. So I always switch off the click detection, so must use the buttons for that. It does lower the usability of the touch pad, especially the drag-and-drop part.
I've also used this clit mouse thing and actually it takes a while to get used to but after that it works better for me than the touch pad.
What happened to the second-hand market? Buying a used ROM from someone is a way to get your hands on a legit game, isn't it? Assuming this someone got their ROM legit of course.
The games now still played tend to be the more popular games of their days; the unpopular ones tend to be forgotten soon enough. Them haven been popular means lots of ROMs were sold back then. Surely there are plenty of people that have them sitting around doing nothing. Finding them may be an issue but well there's always Ebay and Craigslist and many other second hand trade sites. Possibly even something dedicated to these vintage ROMs and related stuff.
I'm pretty sure every airline knows where their planes are at any given moment.
If you mean that as in "at which airport, or on which route, and when it will arrive at the next destination" then sure, they will know.
If you mean with that as in "at which exact location above the globe" with exact being less than km resolution, then I'd guess not. Even so, when there is a problem with a plane and it loses contact for whatever reason, it may easily be 100 km away from such a point by the time of a crash.
It is so obviously broken and utterly useless (if not: why would anyone need to install a software update to fix it?) that I really can't be bothered to manually try it out. It's useless. It doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Great that you can manually check a certificate there, but I've got better things to do with my time than manually checking all those certificates that I encounter.
I just get an update from Ubuntu that blacklists Diginotar. So that part is done.
Yet you're also one of those people that doesn't get the point. This kind of blacklisting should be done automatically, in real time, without needing to update software on a client computer. Now other comments mention that there is some automated system, yet the fact that these updates get so much attention and are presented as "the solution" tells me that that system is broken.
I can't be bothered to try it out myself, I'll take your word for it
if there's such a revocation system, why do we still need browser or even OS updates to deal with this issue??
Probably because people are too trusting, and never bother to test that OCSP works..
Do you check the Linux kernel for back doors? Or any other software that you use, like Firefox? I don't. Because I trust the community at large. Not a single vendor. I know there are people that make it their business to make sure there are no back doors in the kernel, or in Firefox, and that SSH has no bugs, and that SSL certificates are secure, and that CAs issue only valid certificates. The whole Diginotar issue came to light not thanks to Diginotar, but thanks to the community at large: security experts that realised something is wrong. I'm not such an expert, I know some of the red flags, but for the rest I'm just a user, like most other people out there, and basically have no choice but to put my trust in those businesses while keeping an eye on media outlets like/. to report on serious issues.
And besides you're completely ignoring my actual question. There is apparently a revocation system in place - and yet we're still struggling with software updates. Ergo, automatic revocation system is broken and useless. And that was my point really.
Certificates can be revoked by putting them on the certificate revocation list. The OCSP protocol is analogous. Here, try it yourself: http://validation.diginotar.nl/ - get an OCSP client (IE7+, FF3+, Chrome, etc do it automatically) and try to authenticate any of the fraudulent certificates.
OK sounds cool. I can't be bothered to try it out myself, I'll take your word for it. But if there's such a revocation system, why do we still need browser or even OS updates to deal with this issue??
The biggest issue that has come to light here imho is that it's nigh impossible to revoke an issued certificate. When a certificate is out, and it's signed by a trusted CA, there is basically no way to revoke it. Revoking involves updating browsers, or even complete operating systems (like Windows or OS-X). Just because one CA made a small mistake, got hacked for whatever reason, and the whole world has to update their software.
Errors will be made. Certificates will be issued erroneously by a CA, or through hacking. Certificates will be lost/stolen. But for some reason there is no proper way in the whole system to fix that kind of errors. If we let it be, it's just a matter of time before the whole system crumbles and nothing can be trusted any more.
Any thoughts on this? Any ideas on how this could be fixed?
OK I don't have aviation experience other than as passenger.
GPS as I said is passive by nature - only if the plane actively sends back its location to say the control tower they know where it is. That's to this date - think of the trouble they had locating that Air France flight over the ocean, besides that it was of course deep sea, they only had a rough idea on where the plane had come down. And where it came down was probably out of range of normal traffic control.
Also planes are going much faster than your car, and if you get lost you can't just stop and have a good look at the map. GPS tech helps with that, but won't fully prevent it. At some 800 km/hr (typical speed of a jetliner) you do 13 km in a minute. So by the time you see the mountain (assuming good visibility) you have barely a minute to react to it. That's not much!
And for the GPS logs: they are usually kept electronically, and after a plane crash usually power is out as well. So that's another complication. Of course these days good chance of someone having a GPS enabled phone, or hand-held GPS device on them, so they could check their position after the crash.
I don't know the exact circumstances or the terrain where this plane crashed, but some things are clear.
It was high up in a mountain in the snow, during winter. You don't walk 20 km in a day in those conditions, especially not people that are not used to that (like your average airplane passenger aka crash survivor). The plane wreckage provided them with shelter, which you won't find easily elsewhere on a mountain. Probably the people involved also didn't have (enough) warm clothes and so to make it.
The WP article even mentions about a group trying to make it out by walking down, on the first day finding the tail section of the plane, and the second day still not having found any shelter nearly froze to death. That's how far they got. And indeed they were walking east, so the correct direction.
OTOH as a general rule of thumb I learned that the best way to go is down. Always down. So that part they were correct. You will eventually find a stream, then a river - and that's where you most likely can find other people. Find a road, even better.
And by the way the WP article is talking about an abandoned hotel 18 miles (so some 30 km) away. Very well possible that the road you're referring to didn't exist 40 years ago.
For starters: GPS is passive. A GPS device knows where it is; but the GPS satellites have no idea who is listening to their signals, if anyone at all, let alone where they are. So while the plane likely had GPS receivers, so the pilot knows where they are, the plane normally doesn't tell the world where it is.
In this case said phone apparently has a tracking function active, and regularly sends its current location to a tracking server. Then the wife of one of the victims logged in to that server, pulled down the last received location from that phone, and told authorities about it.
Also, most phones have AGPS--Assisted GPS. I don't know how well they work without a reasonable cellular network behind them.
In my experience (and from what I read about it), it's as it says: assisted. The phone will use the mobile network to help find an initial fix - how accurate that is depends on the network. And if I understand it correctly, it even needs a network connection (wifi, mobile data) for that to work. It can be as accurate as 10 meters or so. It is mainly used to get a quick initial location fix; it can take over 10 minutes for GPS to get a fix, as it takes that long to get exact time/location data from the satellites. Something like that. I don't know the innards of GPS too well. But what I do know is that sometimes it takes really long to get a fix, especially after phone has been off (e.g. while changing batteries).
The closest example I can give is my folk's place in Vermont, which doesn't have decent cellphone coverage. The map application on my iPhone tends to be off by miles and, occasionally, tens of miles. Of course, the issue there is that they live in a place where the only "clear" sky they have is to the south. North, west, and east are blocked by hills.
Unless you're in a canyon, there should be no issue with mountains. Mountains basically only rise the horizon a bit. I never have problems with mountains (also not on 30 degree slopes with the peaks towering some 500m above you). That your map app is so wildly inaccurate, that's for another reason.
Problems for GPS are blocking the view of the skies (like when you are in a canyon, or under thick foliage, even a thick cloud cover can be a problem), distortions of the signal in the ionosphere, and reflections. The latter you will experience in cities with many highrises, there the signal tends to be very jumpy.
Movies don't have the interstitial effects. Or at least much less so. For a movie 24 fps means 24 frames displayed; the time to change a frame is much less than 1/24th of a second. For a screen like this 6fps means 6 frames displayed, but also implies that the time to change a frame is 1/6th or a second.
This is also exactly why gamers waited so long to ditch those CRTs and started using flat screens. The refresh rate was too slow.
Not that I think it's a problem for books (mostly static images), but you can't fully compare it to movies.
Of course. Security must come in layers, and requires a holistic approach.
But tight computer security can also help keeping the human factor in check. By making sure no unauthorised persons can access the data for starters, particularly related to breaches from the outside. And then making sure there is an audit log of all accesses made to the system, particularly who accessed which piece of sensitive data when. So in case there is a security breach, that there is a way to trace back and know who did it. Knowing that one will get caught for a crime, is a great deterrent and will keep many people from attempting it to begin with.
You can never, ever have 100% security. Especially when people have to actually access data which by nature means data is released by the system. But that doesn't mean you can't do your best, and that's what the NSA is trying to do here on a technical level.
So if I understand this correctly, and to say it simple: any software (and for that matter any creative work) created by the US government automatically falls in the public domain?
It's indeed nothing new. The Netherlands has them for decades already. The only somewhat-new part here is that these houses are amphibian (i.e. floating only when there is a flood, most of the time sitting on dry ground), and even that's something I've heard about for well a decade or so at least. And yes that's also related to Dutch houses.
Indeed reading TFA it's a Dutch company (Dura Vermeer) that's been developing such homes for the past 12 years. Nothing new under the sun. Also it seems no spectacular new developments in the field recently, there is ongoing innovation of course but it doesn't seem to be game-changing.
Oh well. It's good filler for the/. home page at least.
Special case as movie titles are often not translated, but get a totally different title in another language. And then indeed you may know the original title and your language's title, but not the translated version. So IMDB should have a replacement table for titles to make it work well.
Quite often I'm using Google to translate e-mails sent to me in Chinese. Results sometimes are indeed terrible, but most of the time at least I can get the basics out of it. And it helps that I can read some Chinese directly of course, though that's usually not enough to understand a complete message but surely helps.
Overall I'd say the results of machine translation are not bad at all, especially considering how different Chinese and English are.
What you should to add, as mentioned in other comments too: reduce the commands the students can give to a set of very basic and unambiguous commands that you have written on cards. Like "move forward", "move hand up", "stop moving". Because that's what a programming language does too. They can of course use the same command over and over again, but nothing else than that.
After all programming is of course first and foremost a way of thinking, the actual programming language or the computer hardware it runs on doesn't matter much. That only limits the actual commands available, and the speed at which they're executed.
An experimental business in an emergent technology fails to establish itself in a collapsing economy.
My question: why is an experimental business in an emergent technology hiring a whopping 1,100 people? Doesn't sound like "experimental" to me, which tends to be small scale.
Doom is to FPSes as the iPhone is to smart phones. It's not the first one to be released, but the first one to be really popular (at least partly because technology has caught up with the demands of the idea) and the one that all others are compared to.
Eastern European trains (used to) have bottle openers fixed under the window tables. Very convenient. I've used them frequently while traveling in that area.
Dutch trains were even better. Until about 10 years ago it was allowed to smoke on the train (in dedicated smoking compartments). And, as long as you didn't disturb other passengers, smoking weed was also allowed.
So once with a foreign friend I had a late train out of Amsterdam back home - smoking a joint and drinking a beer on the way back home, no problem as we were the only passengers in that compartment. Now that was good:)
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And interestingly all those items you mention can be picked up by the good old metal detector. No groping needed, just a good metal detector, and if the alarm sounds a manual detector to see where the offending object, followed by a check on what that is. That check can be as simply as the passenger showing the object. Still makes me wonder why they decommissioned such a simple and effective device.
Most airports have a single secure area that is shared by all airliners. To get in there, all passengers go through the same entrance(s), regardless of which airline they're flying. Individual airlines have nothing to say there.
Even where security checks are done when entering the gate it's usually the airport that makes these arrangements, if only because the gates are usually shared. It's rare for an airline to have it's dedicated gates, let along it's dedicated airport (or dedicated part/terminal).
With touch pads I always have the problem that while typing some document or so I accidentally touch it and then the cursor jumps to another part of the document. Very irritating. So I always switch off the click detection, so must use the buttons for that. It does lower the usability of the touch pad, especially the drag-and-drop part.
I've also used this clit mouse thing and actually it takes a while to get used to but after that it works better for me than the touch pad.
What happened to the second-hand market? Buying a used ROM from someone is a way to get your hands on a legit game, isn't it? Assuming this someone got their ROM legit of course.
The games now still played tend to be the more popular games of their days; the unpopular ones tend to be forgotten soon enough. Them haven been popular means lots of ROMs were sold back then. Surely there are plenty of people that have them sitting around doing nothing. Finding them may be an issue but well there's always Ebay and Craigslist and many other second hand trade sites. Possibly even something dedicated to these vintage ROMs and related stuff.
I'm pretty sure every airline knows where their planes are at any given moment.
If you mean that as in "at which airport, or on which route, and when it will arrive at the next destination" then sure, they will know.
If you mean with that as in "at which exact location above the globe" with exact being less than km resolution, then I'd guess not. Even so, when there is a problem with a plane and it loses contact for whatever reason, it may easily be 100 km away from such a point by the time of a crash.
It is so obviously broken and utterly useless (if not: why would anyone need to install a software update to fix it?) that I really can't be bothered to manually try it out. It's useless. It doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Great that you can manually check a certificate there, but I've got better things to do with my time than manually checking all those certificates that I encounter.
I just get an update from Ubuntu that blacklists Diginotar. So that part is done.
Yet you're also one of those people that doesn't get the point. This kind of blacklisting should be done automatically, in real time, without needing to update software on a client computer. Now other comments mention that there is some automated system, yet the fact that these updates get so much attention and are presented as "the solution" tells me that that system is broken.
I can't be bothered to try it out myself, I'll take your word for it
if there's such a revocation system, why do we still need browser or even OS updates to deal with this issue??
Probably because people are too trusting, and never bother to test that OCSP works..
Do you check the Linux kernel for back doors? Or any other software that you use, like Firefox? I don't. Because I trust the community at large. Not a single vendor. I know there are people that make it their business to make sure there are no back doors in the kernel, or in Firefox, and that SSH has no bugs, and that SSL certificates are secure, and that CAs issue only valid certificates. The whole Diginotar issue came to light not thanks to Diginotar, but thanks to the community at large: security experts that realised something is wrong. I'm not such an expert, I know some of the red flags, but for the rest I'm just a user, like most other people out there, and basically have no choice but to put my trust in those businesses while keeping an eye on media outlets like /. to report on serious issues.
And besides you're completely ignoring my actual question. There is apparently a revocation system in place - and yet we're still struggling with software updates. Ergo, automatic revocation system is broken and useless. And that was my point really.
Certificates can be revoked by putting them on the certificate revocation list. The OCSP protocol is analogous. Here, try it yourself: http://validation.diginotar.nl/ - get an OCSP client (IE7+, FF3+, Chrome, etc do it automatically) and try to authenticate any of the fraudulent certificates.
OK sounds cool. I can't be bothered to try it out myself, I'll take your word for it. But if there's such a revocation system, why do we still need browser or even OS updates to deal with this issue??
The biggest issue that has come to light here imho is that it's nigh impossible to revoke an issued certificate. When a certificate is out, and it's signed by a trusted CA, there is basically no way to revoke it. Revoking involves updating browsers, or even complete operating systems (like Windows or OS-X). Just because one CA made a small mistake, got hacked for whatever reason, and the whole world has to update their software.
Errors will be made. Certificates will be issued erroneously by a CA, or through hacking. Certificates will be lost/stolen. But for some reason there is no proper way in the whole system to fix that kind of errors. If we let it be, it's just a matter of time before the whole system crumbles and nothing can be trusted any more.
Any thoughts on this? Any ideas on how this could be fixed?
Particularly fast. It's been barely two weeks since that launch failed, and already they figured out what happened. Impressive.
OK I don't have aviation experience other than as passenger.
GPS as I said is passive by nature - only if the plane actively sends back its location to say the control tower they know where it is. That's to this date - think of the trouble they had locating that Air France flight over the ocean, besides that it was of course deep sea, they only had a rough idea on where the plane had come down. And where it came down was probably out of range of normal traffic control.
Also planes are going much faster than your car, and if you get lost you can't just stop and have a good look at the map. GPS tech helps with that, but won't fully prevent it. At some 800 km/hr (typical speed of a jetliner) you do 13 km in a minute. So by the time you see the mountain (assuming good visibility) you have barely a minute to react to it. That's not much!
And for the GPS logs: they are usually kept electronically, and after a plane crash usually power is out as well. So that's another complication. Of course these days good chance of someone having a GPS enabled phone, or hand-held GPS device on them, so they could check their position after the crash.
I don't know the exact circumstances or the terrain where this plane crashed, but some things are clear.
It was high up in a mountain in the snow, during winter. You don't walk 20 km in a day in those conditions, especially not people that are not used to that (like your average airplane passenger aka crash survivor). The plane wreckage provided them with shelter, which you won't find easily elsewhere on a mountain. Probably the people involved also didn't have (enough) warm clothes and so to make it.
The WP article even mentions about a group trying to make it out by walking down, on the first day finding the tail section of the plane, and the second day still not having found any shelter nearly froze to death. That's how far they got. And indeed they were walking east, so the correct direction.
OTOH as a general rule of thumb I learned that the best way to go is down. Always down. So that part they were correct. You will eventually find a stream, then a river - and that's where you most likely can find other people. Find a road, even better.
And by the way the WP article is talking about an abandoned hotel 18 miles (so some 30 km) away. Very well possible that the road you're referring to didn't exist 40 years ago.
It seems you don't understand how GPS works.
For starters: GPS is passive. A GPS device knows where it is; but the GPS satellites have no idea who is listening to their signals, if anyone at all, let alone where they are. So while the plane likely had GPS receivers, so the pilot knows where they are, the plane normally doesn't tell the world where it is.
In this case said phone apparently has a tracking function active, and regularly sends its current location to a tracking server. Then the wife of one of the victims logged in to that server, pulled down the last received location from that phone, and told authorities about it.
Also, most phones have AGPS--Assisted GPS. I don't know how well they work without a reasonable cellular network behind them.
In my experience (and from what I read about it), it's as it says: assisted. The phone will use the mobile network to help find an initial fix - how accurate that is depends on the network. And if I understand it correctly, it even needs a network connection (wifi, mobile data) for that to work. It can be as accurate as 10 meters or so. It is mainly used to get a quick initial location fix; it can take over 10 minutes for GPS to get a fix, as it takes that long to get exact time/location data from the satellites. Something like that. I don't know the innards of GPS too well. But what I do know is that sometimes it takes really long to get a fix, especially after phone has been off (e.g. while changing batteries).
The closest example I can give is my folk's place in Vermont, which doesn't have decent cellphone coverage. The map application on my iPhone tends to be off by miles and, occasionally, tens of miles. Of course, the issue there is that they live in a place where the only "clear" sky they have is to the south. North, west, and east are blocked by hills.
Unless you're in a canyon, there should be no issue with mountains. Mountains basically only rise the horizon a bit. I never have problems with mountains (also not on 30 degree slopes with the peaks towering some 500m above you). That your map app is so wildly inaccurate, that's for another reason.
Problems for GPS are blocking the view of the skies (like when you are in a canyon, or under thick foliage, even a thick cloud cover can be a problem), distortions of the signal in the ionosphere, and reflections. The latter you will experience in cities with many highrises, there the signal tends to be very jumpy.
Movies don't have the interstitial effects. Or at least much less so. For a movie 24 fps means 24 frames displayed; the time to change a frame is much less than 1/24th of a second. For a screen like this 6fps means 6 frames displayed, but also implies that the time to change a frame is 1/6th or a second.
This is also exactly why gamers waited so long to ditch those CRTs and started using flat screens. The refresh rate was too slow.
Not that I think it's a problem for books (mostly static images), but you can't fully compare it to movies.
Of course. Security must come in layers, and requires a holistic approach.
But tight computer security can also help keeping the human factor in check. By making sure no unauthorised persons can access the data for starters, particularly related to breaches from the outside. And then making sure there is an audit log of all accesses made to the system, particularly who accessed which piece of sensitive data when. So in case there is a security breach, that there is a way to trace back and know who did it. Knowing that one will get caught for a crime, is a great deterrent and will keep many people from attempting it to begin with.
You can never, ever have 100% security. Especially when people have to actually access data which by nature means data is released by the system. But that doesn't mean you can't do your best, and that's what the NSA is trying to do here on a technical level.
So if I understand this correctly, and to say it simple: any software (and for that matter any creative work) created by the US government automatically falls in the public domain?
It's indeed nothing new. The Netherlands has them for decades already. The only somewhat-new part here is that these houses are amphibian (i.e. floating only when there is a flood, most of the time sitting on dry ground), and even that's something I've heard about for well a decade or so at least. And yes that's also related to Dutch houses.
Indeed reading TFA it's a Dutch company (Dura Vermeer) that's been developing such homes for the past 12 years. Nothing new under the sun. Also it seems no spectacular new developments in the field recently, there is ongoing innovation of course but it doesn't seem to be game-changing.
Oh well. It's good filler for the /. home page at least.
Special case as movie titles are often not translated, but get a totally different title in another language. And then indeed you may know the original title and your language's title, but not the translated version. So IMDB should have a replacement table for titles to make it work well.
Overall I'd say the results of machine translation are not bad at all, especially considering how different Chinese and English are.
Lovely. I will remember this one, may be useful.
What you should to add, as mentioned in other comments too: reduce the commands the students can give to a set of very basic and unambiguous commands that you have written on cards. Like "move forward", "move hand up", "stop moving". Because that's what a programming language does too. They can of course use the same command over and over again, but nothing else than that.
After all programming is of course first and foremost a way of thinking, the actual programming language or the computer hardware it runs on doesn't matter much. That only limits the actual commands available, and the speed at which they're executed.
An experimental business in an emergent technology fails to establish itself in a collapsing economy.
My question: why is an experimental business in an emergent technology hiring a whopping 1,100 people? Doesn't sound like "experimental" to me, which tends to be small scale.
Doom is to FPSes as the iPhone is to smart phones. It's not the first one to be released, but the first one to be really popular (at least partly because technology has caught up with the demands of the idea) and the one that all others are compared to.
Eastern European trains (used to) have bottle openers fixed under the window tables. Very convenient. I've used them frequently while traveling in that area.
Dutch trains were even better. Until about 10 years ago it was allowed to smoke on the train (in dedicated smoking compartments). And, as long as you didn't disturb other passengers, smoking weed was also allowed.
So once with a foreign friend I had a late train out of Amsterdam back home - smoking a joint and drinking a beer on the way back home, no problem as we were the only passengers in that compartment. Now that was good :)