The most surprising thing is that this site is still in business - apparently many people (presumably mostly men) care about getting laid more than about anything else.
Almost a year ago, a massive data breach put all the details of would-be cheaters out in the open. Result: lots of publicity, and an increase in membership numbers.
The same file, upon analyses, showed very few women on the site. Still, people continued to join the site.
The suspicion of using bots I heard about back then already, where new registered people would start to receive inviting messages from women the moment they signed up, but to read them or reply or whatever they had to start paying for the site. Yet, membership continued to rise.
It must be a pretty sad bunch that signs up for that site. No wonder the real girls stay clear of it.
Those filters block web sites, aka IP addresses. If there is anything that you can not hide from your provider it is the IP address you are connecting to, as somehow your packages have to reach their destination. All they have to do is find the IP address of pornhub and block it.
That is of course unless you are using a VPN, but for that you need a second ISP, the one that connects the server you VPN into and from where you connect to the rest of the Internet. That second ISP may in turn also block access to certain IP addresses.
So the obvious next step would be for your ISP blocking access to the IP addresses of those VPN servers (just like China's Great Firewall is doing already) so you're back to square 1...
5-10% of the audience is for many options more than enough to keep them alive. Why else would Samsung produce so many different phones? Every single one can't be much more than the 10% of their audience (aka customer base), yet having the option is a selling point. You may not be interested in it, but other people may be.
... I'm suggesting that if you are going to use that much money to reduce fatalities, then it would be much better spent on roads and cars. Where many more people die each year (est. 1.25 million in 2010).
It is not a fair comparison. Cars are driven mostly by run-of-the-mill operators. There are drunkards, drug adicts, sick persons, sleep deprived individuals, etc. among drivers of cars and among amateur mechanics.
Even more reason to focus on increasing safety in the road traffic, e.g. by automating the whole driving part.
I was "role-playing" the situation Tesla wants: a driver at the wheel that is actually paying attention, while relying on the autopilot to do the driving, then reacting way too late to a situation because the too late realisation that the autopilot does not react. That's the problem of an incomplete autopilot: is the driver expected to break and steer to avoid obstacles? And if so, which obstacles?
Very well possible that the victim in the actual case didn't even see it coming.
"Oh, over there's a tractor-trailer combo crossing the road. Probably clears well before I'm there. Autopilot on, so car will slow down and stop if needed."
"Mmm.... Trailer still there. Shouldn't it start slowing down by now?"
"WTF it's not slowing down!"
Slams on the brakes while crashing into trailer...
It may be more than low contrast in this accident, as Tesla also mentions using radar (where colour is not an issue), which filters out stuff that looks like overhead road signs (and a trailer does somewhat look like that) to prevent unnecessary braking. Obviously there is an issue with clearance measure in the latter case, though.
Indeed - after they found out the very straight roads of the Noordoostpolder gave rise to many casualties - straight and inviting speeding well above the 80 km/hr speed limit.
Does anyone even still use those, other than for internal calls?
By the way in my area it's normal for 4/5 star hotels to provide mobile phones for clients, with unlimited local calls, unlimited calls to various international destinations and unlimited data. Included with the room.
Just like with phone landlines, dump those piss poor "broadband" wired lines and go for 4G mobile data. Not perfect, I know, but it sounds like the wired offerings are worse and more expensive. Mobile data is getting cheap fast - or do you guys also have cartels there?
Well, technically it could have occurred anywhere. But it really helps people to target you if you are working towards a totalitarian state, with an emphasis on religion no less. Also, if you consider an oppressed minority as "terrorists" for long enough, don't be surprised when they start acting like terrorists (although the Kurdish militants usually have government-related targets - so this looks more like the "classic" IS terrorists).
Considering Turkey's government is being more and more Islamic, and the attack has indeed been credited to IS or supporters of the group, adds a nice level of irony to your statements: Muslims attacking a Muslim country for being Muslim.
Already drones have been crash landing on the lawns of the White House. I assume by accident. It is not too much of a stretch to imagine a determined operator to fly a drone and do a targeted crash landing on the roof or into a window and have it detonate some form of explosive upon crashing.
Funny or not: can you suggest a viable alternative? I'm personally very interested as well.
I'm running a small local tour company (not in the USA, by the way) and a few years ago I built a system to allow people to book tickets to my tours through my web site. Payment options are local bank transfer and PayPal/credit card. Many people here don't have a PayPal account but most do have a credit card, so I get many payments by credit card. It works fine, fees are at about 4.5% (so 3% for the credit card company and 1.5% for PayPal - which imho is fair enough), and those bookings are then processed fully automatically. That's great, I'm quite happy with it as it goes.
Now when I started this, I've been looking for alternatives to PayPal, and found none. A few credit card processors for high volume (10-100 times my turnover) and still fees that were much higher than PayPal's. Getting a direct credit card merchant account with a bank (and dealing with all the security of credit card numbers - no thanks! No credit card details on my systems, please!). That's about it. I see many many other companies using PayPal as their credit card processor, and it appears to be PayPal or DIY, where the DIY option is for the big guys only that can afford the liability and have the capacity to deal with highly sensitive information like credit card details.
So, seriously. Is there a valid competitor to PayPal? Reasonable fees (under 5% of the transaction amount, no monthly fee), willing to handle small amounts and no minimum monthly turnover, being able to integrate with your web site (only the checkout part is done on PayPal using their web API, after which customer is sent back to my site), and easy transfer of funds received to local bank accounts all over (most parts of) the world? Having one that's located within the EU would be icing on the cake.
The situation here in Hong Kong is a bit different. There are taxis, clearly marked so, which all need a license (which US generally calls "medallion" - and indeed they're in short supply) to operate. Drivers need to have undergone certain training. Licenses are linked to vehicles, and drivers generally rent the vehicles on a per shift basis. That's pretty much the same all over the world.
Other than that, there is the "hire car" permit. Everyone can register their car as "hire car", and then start picking up paying passengers. These cars are generally unmarked and have to be booked in advance. There is no limit on permits, which are handed out if certain criteria related to the driver and the vehicle (such as driving license, residency status, insurance) are met. This are generally luxury vehicles, and a typical fare is about that of a taxi. For that you get a nicer vehicle, and many can take 7 passengers, while taxis can take only 4-5.
Uber falls under the second system, and they COULD operate legally in the city if they would require all their drivers would have these hire car permits. Many do, as this are simply drivers that had such a permit already and take Uber rides as extra jobs. However there are also drivers that do not have such permits and still drive for Uber - illegally.
So this means all the content you store on MS's services is there completely unencrypted, fully readable to MS themselves and in extension everyone asking nicely enough?
Anyone using their services should really reconsider and look for cloud services that encrypt by default, or encrypt their stuff before uploading it to the cloud storage.
Missed the total numbers of men and women that give ratings.
Having heard before that there are more women watching TV (partly due to housewives watching daytime TV as their husbands are working) I would expect overall more ratings from women than from men. With the men's shows more skewed towards male ratings than women's shows, it seems there are many more men rating shows than women.
This may also skew ratings.
Furthermore, I missed listings of how women rate Star Trek for example, compared to men. Do they rate it worse, or better?
And how about total ratings: is the average rating given by all women across all shows the same as the average rating given by men?
The big question is, why? Why would they want to do this?
Not so much the camouflage, but why reading all those license plates? What is the purpose of collecting that data, and what's going to happen with it? Is this a one-off (looking for a specific vehicle) or routine surveillance trying to map movements of individual vehicles?
I can understand such an action if they're specifically looking for a suspect - someone they know is driving around the area, expected to use that road, but it's a needle in a haystack to find an individual car in a big city. But if not, what could possibly be the use of such data - effectively a list of license plate numbers (which of course can be linked to car owners - not necessarily drivers) and time/location? Without having lots and lots of collection points and almost continuous collection at all those points it seems quite useless to me.
Well, actually this is where the plot really thickens, as reportedly the professor got back on the plane and continued the flight, but the woman who reported him did not (link in Dutch - use Google Translate if you need). So what happened to her? And - maybe even more importantly - was her luggage removed from the plane before it left? Because if not, now that would be a real security leak.
The links provided by AC mention indeed sodium as tried, then rejected in favour of salt (a mix of sodium and potassium nitrates - this melts at fairly low temperatures). It also mentions that this salt mixture is a tried and tested method of heat transfer with which a lot of experience exists, so the problem isn't that bad obviously. A key difference is of course that in flash powder the metal is highly reactive (e.g. magnesium), ground very fine and mixed thoroughly with the salt. Building the plant from a less reactive metal like nickel (a commonly used metal for such applications) prevents the piping to react with the salt.
Third-party cookies are blocked at browser level, and the cookie killer isn't that dumb. It knows which cookies come from opening which site, so can handle those as well.
I don't bother too much blocking tracker cookies as upon closing a tab all cookies that belong to it are automatically removed as well. So tracking is limited to the one site that sends these cookies (and they don't need that to follow me on their site), and whatever I may happen to use in the other tabs that time and that happens to use the same tracker service. This should allow me to log in to Slate Plus, accepting all tracker cookies, but seconds after I close the tab those trackers are gone just the same.
There are indeed those "super cookies" and so, but nothing is perfect. It does prevent me wasting lots of time trial-and-erroring which of the dozen I have to allow to get logged in or whitelisting anything but sites I really want a persistent login or so (not many thanks to LastPass taking care of logging in again and again painlessly).
Not likely they can get (much) more for their power, I guess they're counting on reducing cost through advancing technology or economies of scale, something like that. Just like your typical dotcom.
Slashdot Mirror
The most surprising thing is that this site is still in business - apparently many people (presumably mostly men) care about getting laid more than about anything else.
Almost a year ago, a massive data breach put all the details of would-be cheaters out in the open. Result: lots of publicity, and an increase in membership numbers.
The same file, upon analyses, showed very few women on the site. Still, people continued to join the site.
The suspicion of using bots I heard about back then already, where new registered people would start to receive inviting messages from women the moment they signed up, but to read them or reply or whatever they had to start paying for the site. Yet, membership continued to rise.
It must be a pretty sad bunch that signs up for that site. No wonder the real girls stay clear of it.
Those filters block web sites, aka IP addresses. If there is anything that you can not hide from your provider it is the IP address you are connecting to, as somehow your packages have to reach their destination. All they have to do is find the IP address of pornhub and block it.
That is of course unless you are using a VPN, but for that you need a second ISP, the one that connects the server you VPN into and from where you connect to the rest of the Internet. That second ISP may in turn also block access to certain IP addresses.
So the obvious next step would be for your ISP blocking access to the IP addresses of those VPN servers (just like China's Great Firewall is doing already) so you're back to square 1...
5-10% of the audience is for many options more than enough to keep them alive. Why else would Samsung produce so many different phones? Every single one can't be much more than the 10% of their audience (aka customer base), yet having the option is a selling point. You may not be interested in it, but other people may be.
...
I'm suggesting that if you are going to use that much money to reduce fatalities, then it would be much better spent on roads and cars. Where many more people die each year (est. 1.25 million in 2010).
It is not a fair comparison. Cars are driven mostly by run-of-the-mill operators. There are drunkards, drug adicts, sick persons, sleep deprived individuals, etc. among drivers of cars and among amateur mechanics.
Even more reason to focus on increasing safety in the road traffic, e.g. by automating the whole driving part.
I was "role-playing" the situation Tesla wants: a driver at the wheel that is actually paying attention, while relying on the autopilot to do the driving, then reacting way too late to a situation because the too late realisation that the autopilot does not react. That's the problem of an incomplete autopilot: is the driver expected to break and steer to avoid obstacles? And if so, which obstacles?
Very well possible that the victim in the actual case didn't even see it coming.
Well, that's the problem with autopilot.
"Oh, over there's a tractor-trailer combo crossing the road. Probably clears well before I'm there. Autopilot on, so car will slow down and stop if needed."
"Mmm.... Trailer still there. Shouldn't it start slowing down by now?"
"WTF it's not slowing down!"
Slams on the brakes while crashing into trailer...
It may be more than low contrast in this accident, as Tesla also mentions using radar (where colour is not an issue), which filters out stuff that looks like overhead road signs (and a trailer does somewhat look like that) to prevent unnecessary braking. Obviously there is an issue with clearance measure in the latter case, though.
Indeed - after they found out the very straight roads of the Noordoostpolder gave rise to many casualties - straight and inviting speeding well above the 80 km/hr speed limit.
I think the much higher standards for getting a driving license in Europe do a lot as well.
Does anyone even still use those, other than for internal calls?
By the way in my area it's normal for 4/5 star hotels to provide mobile phones for clients, with unlimited local calls, unlimited calls to various international destinations and unlimited data. Included with the room.
Just like with phone landlines, dump those piss poor "broadband" wired lines and go for 4G mobile data. Not perfect, I know, but it sounds like the wired offerings are worse and more expensive. Mobile data is getting cheap fast - or do you guys also have cartels there?
Well, technically it could have occurred anywhere. But it really helps people to target you if you are working towards a totalitarian state, with an emphasis on religion no less. Also, if you consider an oppressed minority as "terrorists" for long enough, don't be surprised when they start acting like terrorists (although the Kurdish militants usually have government-related targets - so this looks more like the "classic" IS terrorists).
Considering Turkey's government is being more and more Islamic, and the attack has indeed been credited to IS or supporters of the group, adds a nice level of irony to your statements: Muslims attacking a Muslim country for being Muslim.
Already drones have been crash landing on the lawns of the White House. I assume by accident. It is not too much of a stretch to imagine a determined operator to fly a drone and do a targeted crash landing on the roof or into a window and have it detonate some form of explosive upon crashing.
Funny or not: can you suggest a viable alternative? I'm personally very interested as well.
I'm running a small local tour company (not in the USA, by the way) and a few years ago I built a system to allow people to book tickets to my tours through my web site. Payment options are local bank transfer and PayPal/credit card. Many people here don't have a PayPal account but most do have a credit card, so I get many payments by credit card. It works fine, fees are at about 4.5% (so 3% for the credit card company and 1.5% for PayPal - which imho is fair enough), and those bookings are then processed fully automatically. That's great, I'm quite happy with it as it goes.
Now when I started this, I've been looking for alternatives to PayPal, and found none. A few credit card processors for high volume (10-100 times my turnover) and still fees that were much higher than PayPal's. Getting a direct credit card merchant account with a bank (and dealing with all the security of credit card numbers - no thanks! No credit card details on my systems, please!). That's about it. I see many many other companies using PayPal as their credit card processor, and it appears to be PayPal or DIY, where the DIY option is for the big guys only that can afford the liability and have the capacity to deal with highly sensitive information like credit card details.
So, seriously. Is there a valid competitor to PayPal? Reasonable fees (under 5% of the transaction amount, no monthly fee), willing to handle small amounts and no minimum monthly turnover, being able to integrate with your web site (only the checkout part is done on PayPal using their web API, after which customer is sent back to my site), and easy transfer of funds received to local bank accounts all over (most parts of) the world? Having one that's located within the EU would be icing on the cake.
Of course they're going to die on Mars. How are you ever going to get them a rocket to return to Earth?
The situation here in Hong Kong is a bit different. There are taxis, clearly marked so, which all need a license (which US generally calls "medallion" - and indeed they're in short supply) to operate. Drivers need to have undergone certain training. Licenses are linked to vehicles, and drivers generally rent the vehicles on a per shift basis. That's pretty much the same all over the world.
Other than that, there is the "hire car" permit. Everyone can register their car as "hire car", and then start picking up paying passengers. These cars are generally unmarked and have to be booked in advance. There is no limit on permits, which are handed out if certain criteria related to the driver and the vehicle (such as driving license, residency status, insurance) are met. This are generally luxury vehicles, and a typical fare is about that of a taxi. For that you get a nicer vehicle, and many can take 7 passengers, while taxis can take only 4-5.
Uber falls under the second system, and they COULD operate legally in the city if they would require all their drivers would have these hire car permits. Many do, as this are simply drivers that had such a permit already and take Uber rides as extra jobs. However there are also drivers that do not have such permits and still drive for Uber - illegally.
It's just a situation of a great idea being brought down by terrible implementation.
In many countries Uber could be legal, if only they bothered to follow local legislation.
So this means all the content you store on MS's services is there completely unencrypted, fully readable to MS themselves and in extension everyone asking nicely enough?
Anyone using their services should really reconsider and look for cloud services that encrypt by default, or encrypt their stuff before uploading it to the cloud storage.
Missed the total numbers of men and women that give ratings.
Having heard before that there are more women watching TV (partly due to housewives watching daytime TV as their husbands are working) I would expect overall more ratings from women than from men. With the men's shows more skewed towards male ratings than women's shows, it seems there are many more men rating shows than women.
This may also skew ratings.
Furthermore, I missed listings of how women rate Star Trek for example, compared to men. Do they rate it worse, or better?
And how about total ratings: is the average rating given by all women across all shows the same as the average rating given by men?
The big question is, why? Why would they want to do this?
Not so much the camouflage, but why reading all those license plates? What is the purpose of collecting that data, and what's going to happen with it? Is this a one-off (looking for a specific vehicle) or routine surveillance trying to map movements of individual vehicles?
I can understand such an action if they're specifically looking for a suspect - someone they know is driving around the area, expected to use that road, but it's a needle in a haystack to find an individual car in a big city. But if not, what could possibly be the use of such data - effectively a list of license plate numbers (which of course can be linked to car owners - not necessarily drivers) and time/location? Without having lots and lots of collection points and almost continuous collection at all those points it seems quite useless to me.
Well, actually this is where the plot really thickens, as reportedly the professor got back on the plane and continued the flight, but the woman who reported him did not (link in Dutch - use Google Translate if you need). So what happened to her? And - maybe even more importantly - was her luggage removed from the plane before it left? Because if not, now that would be a real security leak.
The links provided by AC mention indeed sodium as tried, then rejected in favour of salt (a mix of sodium and potassium nitrates - this melts at fairly low temperatures). It also mentions that this salt mixture is a tried and tested method of heat transfer with which a lot of experience exists, so the problem isn't that bad obviously. A key difference is of course that in flash powder the metal is highly reactive (e.g. magnesium), ground very fine and mixed thoroughly with the salt. Building the plant from a less reactive metal like nickel (a commonly used metal for such applications) prevents the piping to react with the salt.
Third-party cookies are blocked at browser level, and the cookie killer isn't that dumb. It knows which cookies come from opening which site, so can handle those as well.
I don't bother too much blocking tracker cookies as upon closing a tab all cookies that belong to it are automatically removed as well. So tracking is limited to the one site that sends these cookies (and they don't need that to follow me on their site), and whatever I may happen to use in the other tabs that time and that happens to use the same tracker service. This should allow me to log in to Slate Plus, accepting all tracker cookies, but seconds after I close the tab those trackers are gone just the same.
There are indeed those "super cookies" and so, but nothing is perfect. It does prevent me wasting lots of time trial-and-erroring which of the dozen I have to allow to get logged in or whitelisting anything but sites I really want a persistent login or so (not many thanks to LastPass taking care of logging in again and again painlessly).
Not likely they can get (much) more for their power, I guess they're counting on reducing cost through advancing technology or economies of scale, something like that. Just like your typical dotcom.