... had he not taken part in the buyout of CompUSA years ago. Hence Bill Gates should be personally thanking all the unemployed upper management idiots at CompUSA for keeping him on top of the list for just a little bit longer...
For the Wii to somehow to important to this death, we need to believe that playing the Wii taught a three-year-old kid:
How to load a gun
How to ready it to fire
How to turn off the safety
How to aim it
How to pull the trigger
I am not aware of any games for the Wii that teach all of those skills, let alone at a level that a three-year-old could likely comprehend and manage. Perhaps they have access to some Wii titles I am not familiar with?
Oh, wait. The gun was left laying around loaded, cocked, and ready to fire within reach of the three-year-old. It's good to see that we are properly placing blame where it belongs - on Nintendo, of course.
There are very few affordable programs that are worth anything for writing down things like mathematical equations, chemical reactions, physical diagrams, electrical circuits, etc. I tried taking notes on my laptop one year in undergrad and found that the only class where that was the least bit useful was history, but even there it was debatable. The smart student knows that pen-and-paper notes are cheaper, lighter, more flexible, and never run out of batteries.
That said, the professors would probably be just as well to let the students figure this out the hard way. I've never been in a class where it mattered how many people the professor flunked based on poor test scores. And then later on those students will be writing in online forums about how foolish it was for them to try to take notes on their laptop...
... But I still can't go there. Well, at least not from the US. But I might happen to know someone from the US who drove to Canada and then flew to Cuba from Canada (flying over the US to get there of course). Clearly, this is what freedom is all about, right? We have freedom to not travel freely!
I'm surprised there isn't a press release telling us Kim Jong-Il programmed the majority of the OS himself in his spare time, it is the type of thing the Glorious Leader usually does.
Only the majority? You don't seem to know Kim Jong-Il very well. Considering he has his people tell us he is a world-record golfer, an avid fighter pilot (in spite of being afraid of flying), and capable of memorizing entire phone books, they wouldn't stop at majority. They would tell us that he gloriously wrote the entire Linux kernel, which he then selflessly shared with Linus Torvalds.
And then they would go back a step further and say that he is also the original author of Unix itself. By the end of the week he would also be the father of the transistor and semiconductor.
I must be living on a particularly well-situated ivory tower, then, because most of the slashdotters with whom I have the privilege to speak to in person on at least an occasional basis are fairly soft-spoken. I'm not that loud, but I do have a tendency to loom.
To be more verbose, I do mean discussion on slashdot when I refer to conversation. I have not met any slashdot users in person, or at least not any who I regularly exchange messages with here now.
Indeed the people who I exchange messages with here may be quiet in person. However when an article on spam is brought up here, one can pretty well count on someone asking to have a spammer murdered. I suspect one could call this a parallel to Godwin's law - a discussion on spam will invariably reach a point where someone will call for murder to be employed.
I thought the slashdot groupthink was to call for grey-hat botnets to fight the black-hats. Or am I so far out of touch that even my language is outdated, and I only sound faggy and pompous?
I cannot speak for all of slashdot. I can say that whenever spam comes up in conversation the loudest slashdotters are generally the ones calling for blood.
I've heard of this group before. They are one of the few who actually understand what really needs to be done to make an impact on the spamming epidemic. Rather than building enormous black/white lists or developing ever more CPU-intense filtering algorithms, they are actually going after the sources. They identify where spam is actually originating - that is, the spamvertising domains, not the spamvertised domains - and figure out how to shut it down. They are finding where the botnets and their requisite domains can be targeted and getting the work done. And they are doing it within the confines of a civilized society, rather than the bloodthirsty mercanaries that so many people here are calling for regularly.
You're talking about a different company. BBC America is not the BBC.
Correct. And Top Gear (and most of the programming on BBC America) is a BBC program that is carried by BBC America. BBC needs money and I am offering them some of mine if they will sell me the same DVDs that they are selling in the UK.
Also, doesn't America have some law which states programs have to finish on the hour and half hour?
No such law that I am aware of. I see unusual start/end times on cable fairly often.
However that is not relevant to what I am seeking. I am offering to pay BBC directly for DVDs that they sell in the UK. If you release something on DVD there is no reason why it needs to be the identical product to what was shown in TV.
If they would just start selling full episodes of Top Gear (amongst others) over here in the states. My British counterparts get to see full one-hour episodes of Top Gear when they are in the UK. But here in the US I cannot have that from the BBC, for any amount of money. BBC America shows me the butchered 40-minute episodes. Sure, I can accept that they need to sell advertising space here. But why can't they sell the full episodes on DVD here? If I buy the BBC America DVDs I get the same 40-minute episodes that they show on TV here. And BBC UK won't sell me the regular DVDs - they are region encoded (and PAL) but that doesn't matter since they won't sell them to me anyways.
And there it is in the article, what are you complaining about again? Oh right, TFA and slashdot editors. Carry on, then.
Precisely. Because while it was defined in the article, it was not defined in the summary. The summary jumped immediately from the name of the algorithm to using the shorthand, without ever saying that the shorthand would be used in place of the full name. And being as there are other uses of the CS acronym - especially in the slashdot community - the slashdot editors failed miserably by not stating that they were going to reuse a commonly used acronym.
Did we really need to refer to it as CS in the summary? A quick glance of the summary could lead one to think that this guy is the inventor of Computer Science, rather than the correct Compressed Sensing... In the summary of an article that is concerned (in part) with maintaining information after compression, we lost quite a bit of information in abbreviating the name of his algorithm.
A progressive is a progressive no matter which party they are under
And why would you associate restrictions on freedom with progressive ideals?
The D or the R doesn't matter, stop thinking one party is better than the other.
I'm not sure how you came to conclude that I was saying one was better than the other. They both have plenty of problems. I'm just tired of the endless media feeds of how the current president is some sort of evil satanic islamo-fascist abortionist cannibal simply because he doesn't have an R after his name.
I hate to burst your bubble, but presidents have nothing to do with Constitutional amendments
You are correct on that part. However, prohibition did not actually prohibit anything until the passage of the Volstead Act which actually defined what (product) was being prohibited. And that act was vetoed by Wilson.
This was a progressive (socialist/fascist/communist/liberal) idea
If you group socialism, fascism, communism, and liberalism all under the same umbrella, you need to actually read up on those four very different philosophical structures. There are profound differences between those four ideals, both in theory and in application.
However equally important is to realize that there was nothing "progressive" about repealing the sale of "intoxicating beverages". Indeed, it would be better viewed as a regressive act, as it was in no way empowering for the lower socio-economic classes.
Unfortunately, progressivism had it's claws in both parties, but is mostly gone from the Republican party.
You have a strange view of "progressivism". It is no small wonder you posted as an anonymous coward.
This comment is going to get modded to hell.
Being as there is no moderation for "factually inaccurate", you are safe from reasonable moderation. Although some may consider your post to be far enough removed from reason to be trolling.
Prohibition passed congress under the administration of a Republican president (Teddy Roosevelt). It then went to the desk of a Democratic president (Wilson) who vetoed the measure. The congress in their infinite wisdom then overturned his veto. Then in 1933, under another Democratic president (Franklin Roosevelt) prohibition was repealed.
We've seen this before, ways to push people away from your WiFi without actually securing it. But previously we had creative things to do with the users, like reversing their pages or directing everything to pictures of kittens. This isn't anywhere nearly as inspired.
Seriously - If I was willing to move out of the U.S. and good health care was on my list of needs, where should I go?
I would probably consider a few other important bits when thinking of countries to immigrate to:
What languages do you speak? Sure, if you only speak English you can probably "get by" in most other countries since they usually teach English as a second language to almost everyone, but do you want to be disadvantaged right from the start?
How far away from the US are you willing to move - or how many people in the US would you like to be able to visit or talk to regularly?
How attached are you culturally to the US? Sure you can get a McDonald's hamburger anywhere in the world, but are there American conveniences you might miss?
What kind of climate would you consider to be "liveable"? Or in another way to phrase it, would you rather spend more on heat or air conditioning?
That would be a reasonable solution, the kind that the rest of the developed world has come to use and expect. Hence we cannot have it here in the US because it would somehow be "un-American".
or at least those exchanges they're talking about
That will either end up dropped from the bill (for the same reasons as above) or it will end up only helping the insurance companies to cooperatively form a giant monopoly. In the end, if it passes, it won't help.
Oh, and get rid of the anti-trust law exemption
They have already nearly buried any chance of that happening. They have been selling it as "good for the consumer" so heavily so far that it isn't going away anytime soon.
make the insurance companies compete across state lines.
That is a questionable tactic to accomplish anything than more paperwork and further accelerate healthcare costs. As it is, clinics have to carefully decide which plans to honor and which to reject because of the excessive paperwork and nonsense that their current plans require. If suddenly every plan from all 50 states could potentially be coming to the window, how will an office decide which plans to deal with? They would need more office workers than health care workers if they wanted to handle every conceivable plan; and then every potential medical decision would end up being reviewed and second-guessed just to maximize the likelihood of it being covered by the plan of any given patient.
Unfortunately the current health care bailout proposal in congress will solve pretty much none of these problems. And anything that even in the slightest possible way resembles reform will be dead in the water.
I was about to ask the obvious question of what this botnet is doing with a collection of routers at its command. Then I read the article:
Right now Chuck Norris-infected machines can be used to attack other systems on the Internet, in what are known as distributed denial of service attacks. The botnet can launch a password-guessing dictionary attack on another computer, and it can also change the DNS (Domain Name System) settings in the router. With this attack, victims on the router's network who think they are connecting to Facebook or Google end up redirected to a malicious Web page that then tries to install a virus on their computers.
Which I guess is actually pretty clever. The botnet recruits routers with minimal effort, and gets about as much out of them as it can. Unfortunately for the botnet masters the technique has an obvious Achille's Heel:
Because the Chuck Norris botnet lives in the router's RAM, it can be removed with a restart
Although they also mention
It is controlled via IRC
Which is pretty common for a lot of botnets. This does leave an obvious prevention tactic for ISPs; they could ship out routers configured to reject all IRC traffic. They likely wouldn't receive any complaints as anyone who uses IRC would likely know how to check their routers to ensure the traffic is allowed.
As best I know, you are absolutely right on that. However that still leaves the problem of figuring out where the botnet originated, and more likely more importantly where the author of the important code lives. I doubt that search would be worth the time it would take to do it; and considering the second and third-world countries where these botnets usually get their starts, it might not be a worthwhile pursuit anyways.
In short I think Chuck Norris likely has better things to do with his time and money. But of course I am not Chuck Norris, nor am I his legal advisor, nor do I play either of them on TV.
what's to stop Chuck Norris from taking legal action against the researchers who coined the name?
International boundaries, for one. Likely the author of the software for the botnet does not reside in the US (if that person's location is even known). Chuck Norris can take all the legal action he wants within the US against the botnet author or botnet master, it generally won't mean squat if they are in a different country.
Slashdot Mirror
... had he not taken part in the buyout of CompUSA years ago. Hence Bill Gates should be personally thanking all the unemployed upper management idiots at CompUSA for keeping him on top of the list for just a little bit longer...
I am not aware of any games for the Wii that teach all of those skills, let alone at a level that a three-year-old could likely comprehend and manage. Perhaps they have access to some Wii titles I am not familiar with?
Oh, wait. The gun was left laying around loaded, cocked, and ready to fire within reach of the three-year-old . It's good to see that we are properly placing blame where it belongs - on Nintendo, of course.
There are very few affordable programs that are worth anything for writing down things like mathematical equations, chemical reactions, physical diagrams, electrical circuits, etc. I tried taking notes on my laptop one year in undergrad and found that the only class where that was the least bit useful was history, but even there it was debatable. The smart student knows that pen-and-paper notes are cheaper, lighter, more flexible, and never run out of batteries.
That said, the professors would probably be just as well to let the students figure this out the hard way. I've never been in a class where it mattered how many people the professor flunked based on poor test scores. And then later on those students will be writing in online forums about how foolish it was for them to try to take notes on their laptop...
if only they can create a perpetual motion device
Thermodynamics fail
I think he was making a joke there.
But don't worry if you missed it, the joke will keep going...
... But I still can't go there. Well, at least not from the US. But I might happen to know someone from the US who drove to Canada and then flew to Cuba from Canada (flying over the US to get there of course). Clearly, this is what freedom is all about, right? We have freedom to not travel freely!
I'm surprised there isn't a press release telling us Kim Jong-Il programmed the majority of the OS himself in his spare time, it is the type of thing the Glorious Leader usually does.
Only the majority? You don't seem to know Kim Jong-Il very well. Considering he has his people tell us he is a world-record golfer, an avid fighter pilot (in spite of being afraid of flying), and capable of memorizing entire phone books, they wouldn't stop at majority. They would tell us that he gloriously wrote the entire Linux kernel, which he then selflessly shared with Linus Torvalds.
And then they would go back a step further and say that he is also the original author of Unix itself. By the end of the week he would also be the father of the transistor and semiconductor.
... $100 e-meter. Thankfully there is a kind group nearby who will hook me up to theirs for a nominal fee until that comes around.
I must be living on a particularly well-situated ivory tower, then, because most of the slashdotters with whom I have the privilege to speak to in person on at least an occasional basis are fairly soft-spoken. I'm not that loud, but I do have a tendency to loom.
To be more verbose, I do mean discussion on slashdot when I refer to conversation. I have not met any slashdot users in person, or at least not any who I regularly exchange messages with here now.
Indeed the people who I exchange messages with here may be quiet in person. However when an article on spam is brought up here, one can pretty well count on someone asking to have a spammer murdered. I suspect one could call this a parallel to Godwin's law - a discussion on spam will invariably reach a point where someone will call for murder to be employed.
I thought the slashdot groupthink was to call for grey-hat botnets to fight the black-hats. Or am I so far out of touch that even my language is outdated, and I only sound faggy and pompous?
I cannot speak for all of slashdot. I can say that whenever spam comes up in conversation the loudest slashdotters are generally the ones calling for blood.
I've heard of this group before. They are one of the few who actually understand what really needs to be done to make an impact on the spamming epidemic. Rather than building enormous black/white lists or developing ever more CPU-intense filtering algorithms, they are actually going after the sources. They identify where spam is actually originating - that is, the spamvertising domains, not the spamvertised domains - and figure out how to shut it down. They are finding where the botnets and their requisite domains can be targeted and getting the work done. And they are doing it within the confines of a civilized society, rather than the bloodthirsty mercanaries that so many people here are calling for regularly.
You're talking about a different company. BBC America is not the BBC.
Correct. And Top Gear (and most of the programming on BBC America) is a BBC program that is carried by BBC America. BBC needs money and I am offering them some of mine if they will sell me the same DVDs that they are selling in the UK.
Also, doesn't America have some law which states programs have to finish on the hour and half hour?
No such law that I am aware of. I see unusual start/end times on cable fairly often.
However that is not relevant to what I am seeking. I am offering to pay BBC directly for DVDs that they sell in the UK. If you release something on DVD there is no reason why it needs to be the identical product to what was shown in TV.
... maybe its time they sue the company that keeps accidentally dropping pianos on their test track.
If they would just start selling full episodes of Top Gear (amongst others) over here in the states. My British counterparts get to see full one-hour episodes of Top Gear when they are in the UK. But here in the US I cannot have that from the BBC, for any amount of money. BBC America shows me the butchered 40-minute episodes. Sure, I can accept that they need to sell advertising space here. But why can't they sell the full episodes on DVD here? If I buy the BBC America DVDs I get the same 40-minute episodes that they show on TV here. And BBC UK won't sell me the regular DVDs - they are region encoded (and PAL) but that doesn't matter since they won't sell them to me anyways.
And there it is in the article, what are you complaining about again? Oh right, TFA and slashdot editors. Carry on, then.
Precisely. Because while it was defined in the article, it was not defined in the summary. The summary jumped immediately from the name of the algorithm to using the shorthand, without ever saying that the shorthand would be used in place of the full name. And being as there are other uses of the CS acronym - especially in the slashdot community - the slashdot editors failed miserably by not stating that they were going to reuse a commonly used acronym.
Did we really need to refer to it as CS in the summary? A quick glance of the summary could lead one to think that this guy is the inventor of Computer Science, rather than the correct Compressed Sensing... In the summary of an article that is concerned (in part) with maintaining information after compression, we lost quite a bit of information in abbreviating the name of his algorithm.
A progressive is a progressive no matter which party they are under
And why would you associate restrictions on freedom with progressive ideals?
The D or the R doesn't matter, stop thinking one party is better than the other.
I'm not sure how you came to conclude that I was saying one was better than the other. They both have plenty of problems. I'm just tired of the endless media feeds of how the current president is some sort of evil satanic islamo-fascist abortionist cannibal simply because he doesn't have an R after his name.
I hate to burst your bubble, but presidents have nothing to do with Constitutional amendments
You are correct on that part. However, prohibition did not actually prohibit anything until the passage of the Volstead Act which actually defined what (product) was being prohibited. And that act was vetoed by Wilson.
This was a progressive (socialist/fascist/communist/liberal) idea
If you group socialism, fascism, communism, and liberalism all under the same umbrella, you need to actually read up on those four very different philosophical structures. There are profound differences between those four ideals, both in theory and in application.
However equally important is to realize that there was nothing "progressive" about repealing the sale of "intoxicating beverages". Indeed, it would be better viewed as a regressive act, as it was in no way empowering for the lower socio-economic classes.
Unfortunately, progressivism had it's claws in both parties, but is mostly gone from the Republican party.
You have a strange view of "progressivism". It is no small wonder you posted as an anonymous coward.
This comment is going to get modded to hell.
Being as there is no moderation for "factually inaccurate", you are safe from reasonable moderation. Although some may consider your post to be far enough removed from reason to be trolling.
Prohibition passed congress under the administration of a Republican president (Teddy Roosevelt). It then went to the desk of a Democratic president (Wilson) who vetoed the measure. The congress in their infinite wisdom then overturned his veto. Then in 1933, under another Democratic president (Franklin Roosevelt) prohibition was repealed.
We've seen this before, ways to push people away from your WiFi without actually securing it. But previously we had creative things to do with the users, like reversing their pages or directing everything to pictures of kittens. This isn't anywhere nearly as inspired.
Seriously - If I was willing to move out of the U.S. and good health care was on my list of needs, where should I go?
I would probably consider a few other important bits when thinking of countries to immigrate to:
What I really want is a public option
That would be a reasonable solution, the kind that the rest of the developed world has come to use and expect. Hence we cannot have it here in the US because it would somehow be "un-American".
or at least those exchanges they're talking about
That will either end up dropped from the bill (for the same reasons as above) or it will end up only helping the insurance companies to cooperatively form a giant monopoly. In the end, if it passes, it won't help.
Oh, and get rid of the anti-trust law exemption
They have already nearly buried any chance of that happening. They have been selling it as "good for the consumer" so heavily so far that it isn't going away anytime soon.
make the insurance companies compete across state lines.
That is a questionable tactic to accomplish anything than more paperwork and further accelerate healthcare costs. As it is, clinics have to carefully decide which plans to honor and which to reject because of the excessive paperwork and nonsense that their current plans require. If suddenly every plan from all 50 states could potentially be coming to the window, how will an office decide which plans to deal with? They would need more office workers than health care workers if they wanted to handle every conceivable plan; and then every potential medical decision would end up being reviewed and second-guessed just to maximize the likelihood of it being covered by the plan of any given patient.
Unfortunately the current health care bailout proposal in congress will solve pretty much none of these problems. And anything that even in the slightest possible way resembles reform will be dead in the water.
screwing up healthcare (and killing people) for a decade
Well, I think we are well ahead of the curve on that one. In the US we've been screwing up healthcare and killing people for several decades already!
Right now Chuck Norris-infected machines can be used to attack other systems on the Internet, in what are known as distributed denial of service attacks. The botnet can launch a password-guessing dictionary attack on another computer, and it can also change the DNS (Domain Name System) settings in the router. With this attack, victims on the router's network who think they are connecting to Facebook or Google end up redirected to a malicious Web page that then tries to install a virus on their computers.
Which I guess is actually pretty clever. The botnet recruits routers with minimal effort, and gets about as much out of them as it can. Unfortunately for the botnet masters the technique has an obvious Achille's Heel:
Because the Chuck Norris botnet lives in the router's RAM, it can be removed with a restart
Although they also mention
It is controlled via IRC
Which is pretty common for a lot of botnets. This does leave an obvious prevention tactic for ISPs; they could ship out routers configured to reject all IRC traffic. They likely wouldn't receive any complaints as anyone who uses IRC would likely know how to check their routers to ensure the traffic is allowed.
As best I know, you are absolutely right on that. However that still leaves the problem of figuring out where the botnet originated, and more likely more importantly where the author of the important code lives. I doubt that search would be worth the time it would take to do it; and considering the second and third-world countries where these botnets usually get their starts, it might not be a worthwhile pursuit anyways.
In short I think Chuck Norris likely has better things to do with his time and money. But of course I am not Chuck Norris, nor am I his legal advisor, nor do I play either of them on TV.
what's to stop Chuck Norris from taking legal action against the researchers who coined the name?
International boundaries, for one. Likely the author of the software for the botnet does not reside in the US (if that person's location is even known). Chuck Norris can take all the legal action he wants within the US against the botnet author or botnet master, it generally won't mean squat if they are in a different country.