> Unfortunatly he wants to bring face recognition into the CCTV cameras arround the capital,
interesting, have you any evidence for this given the spectacular failure of facial recognition systems whenever they've been tested. And IIRC Newham Borough Council (in central London) was one of the first places in the world to run such a test, in circa 1996 IIRC.
> Ken hates the tube. It's a "posh" way of travelling arround. Ken likes "busses" in a good commumist way.
Sorry, but your language makes me want to drop you into the "Daily Mail reader" category... (ie: swivel eyed loons with only a tenuous grasp of reality.) What evidence do you have for saying "Ken hates the tube"? He was banging on and on about wanting to upgrade, massive increase in investment, etc etc, during the election campaign. He's spent a lot of time & effort fighting the PPP proposal for privatising the tube, something I wholeheartedly agree with (you want Railtrack,/underground/?!?)
> Ken wants the whole country to pay for London's cockups.
OK, you're just talking bollocks now. For your information London subsidises the rest of the country to the tune of over 10 billion per annum (that's billion STERLING, not dollars, BTW.)
> If I were mayor I'd order a project looking at [...] banning cars and busses completely, and having all the streets covered, running with PRT [WTF is 'PRT'??] tracks above, and moving walkways below. Basically turn the whole 10 square miles (or whatever) into a massive mall.
Wow, what an absolutely *fabulous* idea! How on earth can your visionary insight have escaped the selection boards for the major political parties?!
Alternatively, the UK could run an intensive R&D campaign to give everyone personal jetpacks. Or helicopters, and everyone gets a helipad omno their roof. Of course by the time that's done we'll all be living on the moon anyway...
Actually I recently left the Smoke for a nearby commuter town and very dull it is too, so much so I comute back up to London most weekends to stay with friends. I also find myself inthe congestion charge zone during hours of operation (Mon-Fri, 7:30am-6:30pm) several times a month on average.
I have no problem at all with the congestion charge per se - something needs to be done to improve public transport, and this is as good a way of raising funds as any other, now that the neocon regressive tax regieme instituted by Thatcher is now the default set up (the less you earn, the more tax you pay.) Encouraging people not to drifve into Central London (esp the City) is a Good Thing IMHO - I must say I appreciate the quiet & practically empty roads;)
However I've just had an extremely painful experience trying to pay the CC. Their website is absolutely atrocious, breaking just about every usability rule you could think of. eg navigation buttons implemented in Java??!! Why, oh why?! And trying to use it in Lynx (or links) - well, forget it. Then the actual navigation itself is completely b0rked. I imagine 90% of people arriving on the front page want either (a) a link to the "pay online now" form, or (b) the phone-number for paying by credit card. I encourage anyone with ten minutes on their hands to visit the above URL and try hunting for those bits of information. No points for getting half-way through completeing the form before realising they're actually trying to REGISTER you (as in, collect personal info) rather than just taking CC details and car registration number.
So I fired off a somewhat ranty complaint using their (equally dreadful) "contact us" stuff. Yes we've got a fancy DHTML form with a font size set unreadbaly small which stops you typing more than a couple of hundred chars. Oh and of course let's waste 70% of the screen real estate on whitespace , pointless graphics etc etc.
Today I got a response back. Of course it's a canned reply - what really put the icing on the cake was that the mail arrived with an attached HTML page (!) called something like "template.109797653-236" !! Have these people never heard of RFC822? I heard a rumour that the IT infrastructure was built by EDS, which might partly explain how utterly, utterly shite the site is.
I have similar feeliongs about the Oyster card - in theory a smart swipeable card is a good idea, and collecting anonymised data on which journeys people actually make is obviously a Good Thing for planning, resource management etc. but why do I get teh feeling that a bureacracy is rolling and, in tune with the evil schemes of Mr Blunkett, is planning to violate all alleged 'civil liberties' BY DEFAULT? If only a few civil servants would lose their pensions when the inevitable review by the EU court of human rights throws out the whole scheme... ah well a man can dream can't he...
I shall also miss the old cardboard tickets when they're finally phased out. Apart from the saddo-anal-retentive thing of keeping old tickets stamped with particular dates (elections, dead royals, and other days of special celebration) they're absolutely perfect roach material. I shall have to return to collecting old club fliers on Saturday mornings...
"1. japanese intelligent robots programme; they will be able to sustain battle damage 2. worms take over the internet, attacking nuclear powerstations and transport systems 3.... 4. Arnie runs for Governor of California.
Let's hope someone invents factor 2 million suntan lotion" I paraphrase cos I can't find the post.
But dammit, now I'm starting to seriously worry!!!
Sorry, this writeup is wrong in almost every respect. I work at an Infosec co BTW so I do know what I'm talking about.
It's not "on the rise" - luckily, this one's a slow spreader and not terribly effective due to the use of tftp which easily limits it's spread. The _real_ worm won't do anything so dull.
You don't know you've got it when you get a shutdown timer. The worm uses the oc192-dcom.c exploit, which contains the universal offsets which don;t crash the service. The reboots are a symptom that you're being hit by worm/traffic/, and you're vulnerable. You may already have it; you may not.
It's not an easy one to stop. There are reports that the MS patch doesn't fix the issue in every case. In addition, there's another similar DCOM exploit for which Microsoft HAS NOT RELEASED A PATCH. Fortunately, it's just a DoS...
Finally, if you've been owned by this worm, don't waste time messing about with a "removal tool". Back up your data, reformat, reinstall. Or, better, install Linux or BSD:)
The only, uhm, 'interesting' aspect of this worm is that on Friday it's going to nuke WindowsUpdate. The worm will probably never go away competely so W.U. could well be unusable for months to come. Totally predictable, of course, it's just a surprise that it lasted this long.
The interesting thing about the forthcoming EU fine (they're _not_ going to escape it at this stage) is that they've got a history of setting the size of the fine at levels commensurate with the wrong-doing and size of the company concerned. In the case of Microsoft, this could well mean more than a billion dollars.
dark _energy_ is IMHPO rather more interesting; current thinking is that this is what drives inflation, and is responsible for the fact that the rate of expansion of space/time is actually INCREASING rather than decreasing as one would intuitively imagine. So this force has fluctuated several times since the big bang. First from 0 to a high value (inflationary era.) Then the value drops back to a low value (near 0? I don't know) in the aftermath of inflation, as the universe as we know it starts to form - matter condensing out, stars and galaxies forming and evolving metals. Then around now the value starts to increase again, causing expansion to start accelerating once more.
As a layperson with an interest in cosmology and physics, I seem to hear about an increasing number of hacks to the Standard Model. By hacks I mean things like dark energy, whose value apparently fluctuates over (cosmological) timescales; there's another idea that the speed of light(I think?) ha varied over time, and that this is the only way to explain the cepheid data (supernovae of known brightness) as we get to see supernovae from further and further away (which occured further and further back in time of course.)
Isn't the use of ugly hacks to prop up an established theory in the face of contradictory observations an indicator of a theory which needs to be chucked out en masse and reformulated in the light of a more fundamental description of physics?
(I realise this work is more than jsut Lee Smolin's, but he wrote the book I read about it a few years ago.)
As I understand it, there is a serious strand of thought in cosmology that suggests that our universe may be only one of (an infinite number of) alternatives. A small finite area in a parent universe undergoes inflation and blows up like a very fast balloon; for observers within this bubble, theirs is the only universe. Smolin also talks about how this hypothesis might tie in with the six magic physical constants which, if their values were even slightly different, would cause totally different physical conditions within our universe. If the inflationary bubbles occur within singularities, they would also be unknowable to their parent universe. A universe with lots of black holes would tend to give rise to offspring that would also have lots of black holes, and vice versa. I'm badly mangling his explanation of this ! but he provides an IMHO elegant explanation for the phenomena of these numbers' values appearing to have been tuned very precisely to the values neccessary for "our" sort of universe, and hence, life, and ultimately us and any other observers out there.
What's your opinion of this? It seems to me that this hypothesis makes no testable predictions and so falls beyond the remit of the scientific method. Is it just a smart way of talking around the anthropic principle, or might this be one of the key concepts to help tie up the loose ends in the standard model?
OK, well remembered. Hmmm Blackadder, another British TV programme, that makes two plus B7...
All I ever needed to know I learned from
on
Blakes Seven To Return
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Blake's 7
From this page - so good it had to be posted.
* Trust is only dangerous when you have to rely on it.
* Reality is a dangerous concept.
* There is no logical reason why aliens should be hairy.
* I am not stupid, I'm not expendable, and I'm not going.
* No good deed goes unpunished.
* It is frequently easier to be honest when you have nothing to lose.
* Civilization has always depended on courtesy rather than truth.
* On Earth it is considered ill-mannered to kill your friends while committing suicide.
* The art of leadership is delegation.
* All that patience gets you is older.
* Show me someone who believes in something, and I will show you a fool.
* Regret is part of being alive -- but keep it a small part.
* He who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.
* Infallibility depends on your point of view.
* There are times when even the most cynical must trust in luck.
* Heroics seldom run to schedule.
* Dignity, at all costs, dignity.
* The choice is very simple -- either you can fight, or you can die.
* In the end, winning is the only safety.
* Power usually makes its own rules.
* Some days are better than others, Section Leader.
* It is not necessary to become irrational in order to prove that one cares; indeed, it is not necessary to prove it at all.
* While there's life, there's threat.
* Luck has nothing to do with it.
* Strategic withdrawl is running away, but with dignity.
* Idealism is a wonderful thing; all you really need is someone rational to put it to proper use.
* Nobody is indispensible.
* Everyone's entitled to one really bad mistake.
* In the end, your word is all there is, really.
* There are other rules, but you'll find out what those are when you break them.
Hmmm, I hadn't heard of this; surely 'canon' for B7 means only the 52 broadcast TV episodes? I realise there was a nice ambiguity about Avon with the fade to black, roll credits (with no theme, just silence) followed by a brief burst of firing. Left me utterly shell-shocked when I first saw it, I couldn't believe they'd all *died*! Come to think of it I can't think of that being used as the ending of *any* TV or movie, in any genre... oh wait, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. Any others? Not in sf anyway.
I think the best explanation of this is Krishnamurti's [robotwisdom.com]-- Westerners tend to confuse images with realities, and stress themselves out trying to become what the images demand. Even the gnostic gospel of Thomas has Jesus saying one must learn to see an image as an image.
Heh, Buddhism was also the first post-modern, uh, philosophy. cf the finger pointing at the moon, signs & signifiers and all that jazz. Actually I suppose Baudrillard et al would say that the finger IS the moon,.. hmmmm. Further meditation is required:)
Seriously, I recommend it. It's _the_ geek religion* as far as I'm concerned; no contradictions with physics or cosmology, no ridiculous mumbo-jumbo from some 3000 year old oral histories of nomadic shepherds, no all powerful elephant-god floating in the sky somewhere... and Zen will teach you more about programming and network administration than any number of certifications and courses.
*well, apart from Discordianism, or the Church of the SubGenius... which both have a lot of zen in them anyway - the jokes, mainly:)
I must say, personally, I rather regret the paucity of recent SCO stories; I was enjoying a pleasurable frisson every time I checked Slashdot, wondering what the next hilarious turn in the story would be.
Anyone know when something will actually happen, as opposed to someone giving an interview?
Slashdot Mirror
interesting, have you any evidence for this given the spectacular failure of facial recognition systems whenever they've been tested. And IIRC Newham Borough Council (in central London) was one of the first places in the world to run such a test, in circa 1996 IIRC.
> Ken hates the tube. It's a "posh" way of travelling arround. Ken likes "busses" in a good commumist way.
Sorry, but your language makes me want to drop you into the "Daily Mail reader" category... (ie: swivel eyed loons with only a tenuous grasp of reality.) What evidence do you have for saying "Ken hates the tube"? He was banging on and on about wanting to upgrade, massive increase in investment, etc etc, during the election campaign. He's spent a lot of time & effort fighting the PPP proposal for privatising the tube, something I wholeheartedly agree with (you want Railtrack,
> Ken wants the whole country to pay for London's cockups.
OK, you're just talking bollocks now. For your information London subsidises the rest of the country to the tune of over 10 billion per annum (that's billion STERLING, not dollars, BTW.)
> If I were mayor I'd order a project looking at [...] banning cars and busses completely, and having all the streets covered, running with PRT [WTF is 'PRT'??] tracks above, and moving walkways below. Basically turn the whole 10 square miles (or whatever) into a massive mall.
Wow, what an absolutely *fabulous* idea! How on earth can your visionary insight have escaped the selection boards for the major political parties?!
Alternatively, the UK could run an intensive R&D campaign to give everyone personal jetpacks. Or helicopters, and everyone gets a helipad omno their roof. Of course by the time that's done we'll all be living on the moon anyway...
I have no problem at all with the congestion charge per se - something needs to be done to improve public transport, and this is as good a way of raising funds as any other, now that the neocon regressive tax regieme instituted by Thatcher is now the default set up (the less you earn, the more tax you pay.) Encouraging people not to drifve into Central London (esp the City) is a Good Thing IMHO - I must say I appreciate the quiet & practically empty roads
However I've just had an extremely painful experience trying to pay the CC. Their website is absolutely atrocious, breaking just about every usability rule you could think of. eg navigation buttons implemented in Java??!! Why, oh why?! And trying to use it in Lynx (or links) - well, forget it. Then the actual navigation itself is completely b0rked. I imagine 90% of people arriving on the front page want either (a) a link to the "pay online now" form, or (b) the phone-number for paying by credit card. I encourage anyone with ten minutes on their hands to visit the above URL and try hunting for those bits of information. No points for getting half-way through completeing the form before realising they're actually trying to REGISTER you (as in, collect personal info) rather than just taking CC details and car registration number.
So I fired off a somewhat ranty complaint using their (equally dreadful) "contact us" stuff. Yes we've got a fancy DHTML form with a font size set unreadbaly small which stops you typing more than a couple of hundred chars. Oh and of course let's waste 70% of the screen real estate on whitespace , pointless graphics etc etc.
Today I got a response back. Of course it's a canned reply - what really put the icing on the cake was that the mail arrived with an attached HTML page (!) called something like "template.109797653-236" !! Have these people never heard of RFC822? I heard a rumour that the IT infrastructure was built by EDS, which might partly explain how utterly, utterly shite the site is.
I have similar feeliongs about the Oyster card - in theory a smart swipeable card is a good idea, and collecting anonymised data on which journeys people actually make is obviously a Good Thing for planning, resource management etc. but why do I get teh feeling that a bureacracy is rolling and, in tune with the evil schemes of Mr Blunkett, is planning to violate all alleged 'civil liberties' BY DEFAULT? If only a few civil servants would lose their pensions when the inevitable review by the EU court of human rights throws out the whole scheme... ah well a man can dream can't he...
I shall also miss the old cardboard tickets when they're finally phased out. Apart from the saddo-anal-retentive thing of keeping old tickets stamped with particular dates (elections, dead royals, and other days of special celebration) they're absolutely perfect roach material. I shall have to return to collecting old club fliers on Saturday mornings...
Can you say 'Hellgate'?
yesterday, or the day before,..
...
"1. japanese intelligent robots programme; they will be able to sustain battle damage
2. worms take over the internet, attacking nuclear powerstations and transport systems
3.
4. Arnie runs for Governor of California.
Let's hope someone invents factor 2 million suntan lotion"
I paraphrase cos I can't find the post.
But dammit, now I'm starting to seriously worry!!!
Exactly! It's pretty easy, actually:
* Unplug Internet connection
* Download patches from the Internet
* Set up firewall
* Plug in Internet connection
Duh. Burn a CD.
The only, uhm, 'interesting' aspect of this worm is that on Friday it's going to nuke WindowsUpdate. The worm will probably never go away competely so W.U. could well be unusable for months to come. Totally predictable, of course, it's just a surprise that it lasted this long.
What an innovative idea. If only it hadn't occured to Cisco three years ago...
The interesting thing about the forthcoming EU fine (they're _not_ going to escape it at this stage) is that they've got a history of setting the size of the fine at levels commensurate with the wrong-doing and size of the company concerned. In the case of Microsoft, this could well mean more than a billion dollars.
dark _energy_ is IMHPO rather more interesting; current thinking is that this is what drives inflation, and is responsible for the fact that the rate of expansion of space/time is actually INCREASING rather than decreasing as one would intuitively imagine. So this force has fluctuated several times since the big bang. First from 0 to a high value (inflationary era.) Then the value drops back to a low value (near 0? I don't know) in the aftermath of inflation, as the universe as we know it starts to form - matter condensing out, stars and galaxies forming and evolving metals. Then around now the value starts to increase again, causing expansion to start accelerating once more.
Smells fishy to me.
As a layperson with an interest in cosmology and physics, I seem to hear about an increasing number of hacks to the Standard Model. By hacks I mean things like dark energy, whose value apparently fluctuates over (cosmological) timescales; there's another idea that the speed of light(I think?) ha varied over time, and that this is the only way to explain the cepheid data (supernovae of known brightness) as we get to see supernovae from further and further away (which occured further and further back in time of course.)
Isn't the use of ugly hacks to prop up an established theory in the face of contradictory observations an indicator of a theory which needs to be chucked out en masse and reformulated in the light of a more fundamental description of physics?
(I realise this work is more than jsut Lee Smolin's, but he wrote the book I read about it a few years ago.)
As I understand it, there is a serious strand of thought in cosmology that suggests that our universe may be only one of (an infinite number of) alternatives. A small finite area in a parent universe undergoes inflation and blows up like a very fast balloon; for observers within this bubble, theirs is the only universe. Smolin also talks about how this hypothesis might tie in with the six magic physical constants which, if their values were even slightly different, would cause totally different physical conditions within our universe. If the inflationary bubbles occur within singularities, they would also be unknowable to their parent universe. A universe with lots of black holes would tend to give rise to offspring that would also have lots of black holes, and vice versa. I'm badly mangling his explanation of this ! but he provides an IMHO elegant explanation for the phenomena of these numbers' values appearing to have been tuned very precisely to the values neccessary for "our" sort of universe, and hence, life, and ultimately us and any other observers out there.
What's your opinion of this? It seems to me that this hypothesis makes no testable predictions and so falls beyond the remit of the scientific method. Is it just a smart way of talking around the anthropic principle, or might this be one of the key concepts to help tie up the loose ends in the standard model?
We now return you to your scheduled mental opiates.
You haven't lived until you've seen Slyvester McCoy playing 'Bayban the Butcher' - more ham than Parma...
OK, well remembered. Hmmm Blackadder, another British TV programme, that makes two plus B7...
From
this page - so good it had to be posted.
* Trust is only dangerous when you have to rely on it.
* Reality is a dangerous concept.
* There is no logical reason why aliens should be hairy.
* I am not stupid, I'm not expendable, and I'm not going.
* No good deed goes unpunished.
* It is frequently easier to be honest when you have nothing to lose.
* Civilization has always depended on courtesy rather than truth.
* On Earth it is considered ill-mannered to kill your friends while committing suicide.
* The art of leadership is delegation.
* All that patience gets you is older.
* Show me someone who believes in something, and I will show you a fool.
* Regret is part of being alive -- but keep it a small part.
* He who trusts can never be betrayed, only mistaken.
* Infallibility depends on your point of view.
* There are times when even the most cynical must trust in luck.
* Heroics seldom run to schedule.
* Dignity, at all costs, dignity.
* The choice is very simple -- either you can fight, or you can die.
* In the end, winning is the only safety.
* Power usually makes its own rules.
* Some days are better than others, Section Leader.
* It is not necessary to become irrational in order to prove that one cares; indeed, it is not necessary to prove it at all.
* While there's life, there's threat.
* Luck has nothing to do with it.
* Strategic withdrawl is running away, but with dignity.
* Idealism is a wonderful thing; all you really need is someone rational to put it to proper use.
* Nobody is indispensible.
* Everyone's entitled to one really bad mistake.
* In the end, your word is all there is, really.
* There are other rules, but you'll find out what those are when you break them.
Hmmm, I hadn't heard of this; surely 'canon' for B7 means only the 52 broadcast TV episodes? I realise there was a nice ambiguity about Avon with the fade to black, roll credits (with no theme, just silence) followed by a brief burst of firing. Left me utterly shell-shocked when I first saw it, I couldn't believe they'd all *died*! Come to think of it I can't think of that being used as the ending of *any* TV or movie, in any genre... oh wait, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid. Any others? Not in sf anyway.
Demonstrably.
bad to verse... oh, how we laughed!
magnifique!
\a
o/`` take my... meditation... o/`
(Spiritualized )
>
Agreed, I was pressed for time
I think the best explanation of this is Krishnamurti's [robotwisdom.com]-- Westerners tend to confuse images with realities, and stress themselves out trying to become what the images demand. Even the gnostic gospel of Thomas has Jesus saying one must learn to see an image as an image.
Heh, Buddhism was also the first post-modern, uh, philosophy. cf the finger pointing at the moon, signs & signifiers and all that jazz. Actually I suppose Baudrillard et al would say that the finger IS the moon,.. hmmmm. Further meditation is required
> and other similar fads.
>
Couldn't agree more. Find your own path young paddawan
(Yes Lucas stole much of the Jedi philosophy from Buddhism. All the good bits anyway
Seriously, I recommend it. It's _the_ geek religion* as far as I'm concerned; no contradictions with physics or cosmology, no ridiculous mumbo-jumbo from some 3000 year old oral histories of nomadic shepherds, no all powerful elephant-god floating in the sky somewhere... and Zen will teach you more about programming and network administration than any number of certifications and courses.
*well, apart from Discordianism, or the Church of the SubGenius... which both have a lot of zen in them anyway - the jokes, mainly
And who exactly gives a fuck?
I must say, personally, I rather regret the paucity of recent SCO stories; I was enjoying a pleasurable frisson every time I checked Slashdot, wondering what the next hilarious turn in the story would be.
Anyone know when something will actually happen, as opposed to someone giving an interview?