I think you may want to rethink your statement about "kneecapping" the economy there. Hawaii's economy is based of of tourism and almost nothing else (besides a bit of agricultural export from things like pineapple and coffee, neither of which needs a particularly robust electrical grid to function). Those evil environmentalists are making sure that people keep coming to your island by making sure it is still a nice place to visit.
Also, I really get a kick out of the fact that your first post complains about how the electric company won't hook more people up to the grid and then your second post complains about how the environmentalists won't let them build more power plants to feed the already overloaded grid. Your bias is showing just a little bit.
They already do this and they make a killing off people with solar panels right now. See the two posts above by the person talking about how he pays 14 cents per kwh to buy and gets 2 cents if he sells back into the grid.
The real reason they don't want to do this is not that they are losing money, but rather that they are often also heavily invested in coal/gas/oil extraction. Many utilities are also tightly integrated with the very coal mines, etc, that feed their plants, and they don't want to make money on generation and grid operation from solar if it means that some of their precious coal will end up being left in the ground. If even a small fraction of the country bought solar panels, the prices would fall so quickly that soon everyone else would follow suit. This is their nightmare scenario.
Here is a good report about this kind of scenario. The report talks about "stranded carbon" as a result of having to leave it in the ground for climate change reasons, but the same thing would occur if any kind of renewable took off in a big way. Literally trillions of dollars of "book value" of the fossil fuel companies would dissappear as no one would want to buy them.
On many campuses (mine included) you have to register your mac address with the IT department before you are allowed on the net. Until you register they redirect all your traffic to a registration page where you put in your univeristy username and password that you use for your univerity email and whatnot. You can of course do mac spoofing but they just take that to be a second machine and redirect you to the registration page again, so unless you steal someone else's name/password to register it to them they have you.
I am not sure how I feel about having such a system in place but that is how it works. Note that I am not from harvard but I assume they have some similar kind of thing in place. Someone above said you have to click a EULA type agreement everytime you log on to their network so it is not unreasonable to assume they are doing mac registration as well.
Congratulations the reward for correctly calling it was $1 million. Your reward will be split equally with everyone else who called it so you get $0.01 which you can claim at any time. Just send a self addressed stamped envelope to the Boston PD and they will mail you your penny.
Even if they had a veto proof majority the president can still veto the bill as a symbolic act that they do not support it. I am too lazy to look up the history of the veto to find out how often this has occurred but I am sure there have been instances of it, and in a properly functioning system of checks and balances it should actually be a fairly common thing. Look at how often the house and the senate disagree about various issues even though (gerrymandering aside) it is the same pool of voters electing both bodies.
If the president vetoes and it goes back through the houses and becomes law anyway, this is still a different situation than if the president just signs it with no opposition (or with a bullshit signing statement with no actual legal weight behind it).
And you know this how? I voted for Obama the first time because he was an obviously better choice than McCain/Palin (at least in my opinon anyway) but I did not vote for him in the second term because I saw how he failed to live up to what he promised and therefore he didn't get my vote.
In case you are wondering in 2012 I voted for the candidate who was arrested during the campaign. I will leave it as an excercise to the reader to work out who this was.
What is even more funny (and telling) about the reporting on this is that the NSA people in the interview claimed the NSA stopped this attack and then CBS reported that directly with no question about whether this was legitamate or not. They claim this would have bricked all the computers, which presumably includes the one I am typing this message on. So we are just told they stopped the attack... how.
Seriously, how the fuck did they do that?
They claim China wrote some super virus that could brick the bios on a PC and they stopped it. Really? Did they run some bios update on my computer to defend it against this malicious update, because I don't seem to recall taking such defensive measures myself. Or maybe they stopped the virus from propagating around the internet in the first place and therefore protected me from ever seeing the virus in the first place. That must be how they did it, I guess that would explain why the hundreds of antivirus companies never seemed to mention that a world ending virus is a thing that we should all be worried about and maybe, you know, buy some antivirus software from them to defend against.
It also begs the question, if they can stop this virus in such a fashion, why couldn't they stop any other attack in a similar fashion. And then why, not 10 minutes later in the interview, does the head of US cyber command claim we are vulnerable to cyber attack (and therefore the NSA is totally justified in doing all this spying and oh by the way they sure could use a bigger budget).
To call this reporting is just laughable. It's not reporting, it is propaganda, and not even good propaganda. Wow, you stopped a world ending virus, gee thanks NSA. Golly gee willickers I sure am glad you saved us all. Tell me some more about how awesome you all are. Give me a fucking break.
The game you are referring to is Foldit. http://fold.it/portal/ I played it a bit back when it came out and it was an interesting game. It has even been used to find some protein folding solutions that had previously stumped the existing tools used to look for solutions. It doesn't beat the traditional science in every instance (or probably even that many) but having an extra tool in the toolbox never hurts, especially when it is a tool that can be used by thousansds of players with time to kill instead of a handful of highly trained specialists with very limited time.
I think this is a really interesting idea. A poster above who was a grad student who worked on an earlier version of this game pointed out that the goal of these was to find loop invariants in the software (basically a proof by induction that a loop does what you think it does).
With the recent revelations about the NSA backdooring common encryption code I have wanted people to work on something like this to try to 'prove' various software does what it says on the box (PGP, linux kernel, tor, etc). I am glad to hear that there is research being done in this area and hope it succeeds and gets applied to some of the important open source software in use today. Let the unwashed masses do most of the grunt work proving the simple bits like loop invariants and use that to free up the specialist developers to look at the rest of the program.
So a truck is stolen and then quickly recovered but due to the delay of getting upvoted enough to post to the front page of slashdot the 'stolen' story doesn't get posted until the 'recovered' story is already out. No problem though since the very first comment posted in this thread is one pointing this out to anyone reading the article who may not already know this.
This aparently wasn't good enough for you though, so you decided to respond to the comment pointing out the truck is already reovered with _yet another_ comment pointing out the very same information. Way to go.
You can help out directly by creating an account on openstreetmap.org and then helping to map the buildings in the (likely) most affected city of Tacloban. We have set up a task manager job to track the progress of the mapping work at the link below. Every little bit of extra mapping work helps out first responders by giving them a better picture of where aid is likely to be needed. Imagine trying to navigate around a city of 200,000 people without decent maps and then on top of that, a city where many roads might be blocked or flooded, preventing you from taking what is normally the most direct route. Having buildings mapped also helps signifigantly with damage assessments that are also critical to relief work.
Yeah, furthermore; the summary lists these as being a bmp and a depth map (which I assume is also raster data like a bmp). Although I am sure they don't want to compress these to something like jpeg which is lossy, something lossless like tar/gzip before they are sent would probably cut that down by a good margin (20% is likely and depending on the data maybe 50% or more). At that point you are talking something on the order of 50 gb per day which shouldn't cause any problems at all if you throttle the transfer down during work hours and then let it run wild at night.
Science images are NEVER EVER compressed in JPEG. In fact they probably don't even use the TIFF format either. Almost all science images in astronomy are done in the FITS format which I think was developed by NASA. This is because not only does the image need to be lossless raw data in order to be used for proper scientific measurements, but also much metadata must be included with the frame for some kinds of science observations.
Common metadata will include the position of the camera (where the orbiter was when the picture was taken), the camera's orientation (which way it was looking at the time), the exact time when the image was taken, the image exposure time, the camera's CCD temperature, whether on-chip binning has been carried out, the camera's readout noise, the camera's gain, etc. All of this information is necessary for some kinds of science and therefore NASA doesn't want to lose any of this information.
Wrong. The 10 to 20 minutes you speak of is the latency, however this 90 minute figure is probably arrived at by taking the size of the image and dividing by the 6mbps transfer rate. It will take 10-20 minutes after the first bits leave Mars and arrive at Earth, however after Earth sees the first bit they will still have to wait 90 minutes to see the last bit.
Just so everyone knows, I tried to do something similar to this on my account. I did "Withdraw to bank account" for the full balance and then went to close the account. It then told me I cannot close the account right now as there is a pending withdrawal. I tried to cancel the withdrawal to see if there was an option to withdraw the balance on closing the account and found out that you cannot cancel a withdrawal once you have started it. I don't know if they offer a method to withdraw the amount automatically when you close the account but I just wanted to let everyone here know about these issues (the sneaky bastards probably just pocket the money if you don't withdraw it beforehand).
Anyway I plan to finalize the account closing process "in 3-5 buisiness days" when I get my monies. Hope enough people cancel all at once that they feel the sting.
This is kind of a clever post, however I have to wonder why you didn't just post the.torrent file directly as they are normally plaintext and much shorter than the binary-ascii encoded e-mail file that you posted.
Thank you for that, I will not search any further on that then. I had looked at the documentation quite a bit and saw no mention of it so I figured there must be a reason. I never really learned much about the inner workings of DNS, just what it does and the basics of how queries are resolved but not the details.
I have noticed the same thing in my house. Our DNS server that we get from Qwest can take as much as 10-15 seconds to resolve DNS queries sometimes (this is not all the time but when it happens its a major pain). I have dnsmasq running on my Ubuntu box (which will use OpenDNS to resolve cache misses instead of the Qwest DNS server). This makes cache misses faster than they would have been anyway, and cache hits take 0ms. I have switched over all of the computers in the house (both Windows and Linux boxes) to resolve through this machine here and that works very nicely. An added benefit is that if I want to change from OpenDNS to something else I only have to change it in one place now. I definitely recommend doing this.
As the parent post mentions, websites don't change IP often enough for this to be a problem and therefore it makes sense to cache DNS for at least some length of time. DNSMasq seems to honor the keepalive times in the results it gets from upstream. Does anyone here know if there is a way to tell it to keep all entries for at least some length of time (e.g. 1 day) before considering the info stale? This would not only speed up lookups but would further reduce load on the upstream DNS server.
I'm no fan of microsoft either however I think Linus really does have the interests of the kernel and the greater linux community at heart. I agree with him that we need to be very careful to make sure there are no potential licensing issues involved here but as long as the lawyers give it a good look and make sure there are no hidden patent claims, etc. then I think there is no reason not to include the code in the kernel.
I wrestled with the idea for a minute or two and decided I would bite the bullet and take silverlight if I get to see the Feynman (I have been trying to find these videos for a long time, the DVD's are something like $800 if I remember correctly). However when I click the install thing I get "Sorry, your browser is not compatible".
I thought silverlight was supposed to be microsoft's answer to flash but I guess it will never be more than a curiosity/minor annoyance if they can't even be bothered to support firefox. Oh well, as someone above pointed out, torrents are undoubtedly on the way so I'll just have to wait a bit more.
Apparently as of version 3.2.39 they have not. This is the first, and last, time I run code found in a slashdot sig without first analyzing what it does. At least it only required a reboot.
This is of course the obvious reason to not be forthcoming with the list, however there is an implicit admission in this statement. If their filtering technology was worth a damn and not easily circumvented, it wouldn't matter who got their hands on the list as the content is blocked anyway.
Of course they are only responsible for blocking content in one country, or for one ISP, but what business is it of theirs if people use networks not under their jurisdiction to view material they are blocking for their clients.
I realize the above is a troll but what is he referring to with the licensing fee? I've seen this in a few stories and have always wondered what it was.
If I recall correctly this isn't the first code ATI has released and hopefully it won't be the last. I think we are beginning to see companies starting to realize that although there may not be a huge number of linux users, we sure do buy a lot of computer hardware.
To me this seems like it could have really interesting implications for IO queuing algorithms. If this service has an algorithm that can accurately predict what data a game will need then the same technique could be applied to loading data for local applications from the hard drive.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you may want to rethink your statement about "kneecapping" the economy there. Hawaii's economy is based of of tourism and almost nothing else (besides a bit of agricultural export from things like pineapple and coffee, neither of which needs a particularly robust electrical grid to function). Those evil environmentalists are making sure that people keep coming to your island by making sure it is still a nice place to visit.
Also, I really get a kick out of the fact that your first post complains about how the electric company won't hook more people up to the grid and then your second post complains about how the environmentalists won't let them build more power plants to feed the already overloaded grid. Your bias is showing just a little bit.
-AndrewBuck
They already do this and they make a killing off people with solar panels right now. See the two posts above by the person talking about how he pays 14 cents per kwh to buy and gets 2 cents if he sells back into the grid.
The real reason they don't want to do this is not that they are losing money, but rather that they are often also heavily invested in coal/gas/oil extraction. Many utilities are also tightly integrated with the very coal mines, etc, that feed their plants, and they don't want to make money on generation and grid operation from solar if it means that some of their precious coal will end up being left in the ground. If even a small fraction of the country bought solar panels, the prices would fall so quickly that soon everyone else would follow suit. This is their nightmare scenario.
Here is a good report about this kind of scenario. The report talks about "stranded carbon" as a result of having to leave it in the ground for climate change reasons, but the same thing would occur if any kind of renewable took off in a big way. Literally trillions of dollars of "book value" of the fossil fuel companies would dissappear as no one would want to buy them.
http://www.carbontracker.org/carbonbubble
-AndrewBuck
On many campuses (mine included) you have to register your mac address with the IT department before you are allowed on the net. Until you register they redirect all your traffic to a registration page where you put in your univeristy username and password that you use for your univerity email and whatnot. You can of course do mac spoofing but they just take that to be a second machine and redirect you to the registration page again, so unless you steal someone else's name/password to register it to them they have you.
I am not sure how I feel about having such a system in place but that is how it works. Note that I am not from harvard but I assume they have some similar kind of thing in place. Someone above said you have to click a EULA type agreement everytime you log on to their network so it is not unreasonable to assume they are doing mac registration as well.
-AndrewBuck
Congratulations the reward for correctly calling it was $1 million. Your reward will be split equally with everyone else who called it so you get $0.01 which you can claim at any time. Just send a self addressed stamped envelope to the Boston PD and they will mail you your penny.
-AndrewBuck
Even if they had a veto proof majority the president can still veto the bill as a symbolic act that they do not support it. I am too lazy to look up the history of the veto to find out how often this has occurred but I am sure there have been instances of it, and in a properly functioning system of checks and balances it should actually be a fairly common thing. Look at how often the house and the senate disagree about various issues even though (gerrymandering aside) it is the same pool of voters electing both bodies.
If the president vetoes and it goes back through the houses and becomes law anyway, this is still a different situation than if the president just signs it with no opposition (or with a bullshit signing statement with no actual legal weight behind it).
-AndrewBuck
And you know this how? I voted for Obama the first time because he was an obviously better choice than McCain/Palin (at least in my opinon anyway) but I did not vote for him in the second term because I saw how he failed to live up to what he promised and therefore he didn't get my vote.
In case you are wondering in 2012 I voted for the candidate who was arrested during the campaign. I will leave it as an excercise to the reader to work out who this was.
-AndrewBuck
What is even more funny (and telling) about the reporting on this is that the NSA people in the interview claimed the NSA stopped this attack and then CBS reported that directly with no question about whether this was legitamate or not. They claim this would have bricked all the computers, which presumably includes the one I am typing this message on. So we are just told they stopped the attack... how.
Seriously, how the fuck did they do that?
They claim China wrote some super virus that could brick the bios on a PC and they stopped it. Really? Did they run some bios update on my computer to defend it against this malicious update, because I don't seem to recall taking such defensive measures myself. Or maybe they stopped the virus from propagating around the internet in the first place and therefore protected me from ever seeing the virus in the first place. That must be how they did it, I guess that would explain why the hundreds of antivirus companies never seemed to mention that a world ending virus is a thing that we should all be worried about and maybe, you know, buy some antivirus software from them to defend against.
It also begs the question, if they can stop this virus in such a fashion, why couldn't they stop any other attack in a similar fashion. And then why, not 10 minutes later in the interview, does the head of US cyber command claim we are vulnerable to cyber attack (and therefore the NSA is totally justified in doing all this spying and oh by the way they sure could use a bigger budget).
To call this reporting is just laughable. It's not reporting, it is propaganda, and not even good propaganda. Wow, you stopped a world ending virus, gee thanks NSA. Golly gee willickers I sure am glad you saved us all. Tell me some more about how awesome you all are. Give me a fucking break.
-AndrewBuck
The game you are referring to is Foldit. http://fold.it/portal/ I played it a bit back when it came out and it was an interesting game. It has even been used to find some protein folding solutions that had previously stumped the existing tools used to look for solutions. It doesn't beat the traditional science in every instance (or probably even that many) but having an extra tool in the toolbox never hurts, especially when it is a tool that can be used by thousansds of players with time to kill instead of a handful of highly trained specialists with very limited time.
I think this is a really interesting idea. A poster above who was a grad student who worked on an earlier version of this game pointed out that the goal of these was to find loop invariants in the software (basically a proof by induction that a loop does what you think it does).
With the recent revelations about the NSA backdooring common encryption code I have wanted people to work on something like this to try to 'prove' various software does what it says on the box (PGP, linux kernel, tor, etc). I am glad to hear that there is research being done in this area and hope it succeeds and gets applied to some of the important open source software in use today. Let the unwashed masses do most of the grunt work proving the simple bits like loop invariants and use that to free up the specialist developers to look at the rest of the program.
-AndrewBuck
So a truck is stolen and then quickly recovered but due to the delay of getting upvoted enough to post to the front page of slashdot the 'stolen' story doesn't get posted until the 'recovered' story is already out. No problem though since the very first comment posted in this thread is one pointing this out to anyone reading the article who may not already know this.
This aparently wasn't good enough for you though, so you decided to respond to the comment pointing out the truck is already reovered with _yet another_ comment pointing out the very same information. Way to go.
-AndrewBuck
You can help out directly by creating an account on openstreetmap.org and then helping to map the buildings in the (likely) most affected city of Tacloban. We have set up a task manager job to track the progress of the mapping work at the link below. Every little bit of extra mapping work helps out first responders by giving them a better picture of where aid is likely to be needed. Imagine trying to navigate around a city of 200,000 people without decent maps and then on top of that, a city where many roads might be blocked or flooded, preventing you from taking what is normally the most direct route. Having buildings mapped also helps signifigantly with damage assessments that are also critical to relief work.
http://tasks.hotosm.org/job/338
Yeah, furthermore; the summary lists these as being a bmp and a depth map (which I assume is also raster data like a bmp). Although I am sure they don't want to compress these to something like jpeg which is lossy, something lossless like tar/gzip before they are sent would probably cut that down by a good margin (20% is likely and depending on the data maybe 50% or more). At that point you are talking something on the order of 50 gb per day which shouldn't cause any problems at all if you throttle the transfer down during work hours and then let it run wild at night.
-AndrewBuck
Science images are NEVER EVER compressed in JPEG. In fact they probably don't even use the TIFF format either. Almost all science images in astronomy are done in the FITS format which I think was developed by NASA. This is because not only does the image need to be lossless raw data in order to be used for proper scientific measurements, but also much metadata must be included with the frame for some kinds of science observations.
Common metadata will include the position of the camera (where the orbiter was when the picture was taken), the camera's orientation (which way it was looking at the time), the exact time when the image was taken, the image exposure time, the camera's CCD temperature, whether on-chip binning has been carried out, the camera's readout noise, the camera's gain, etc. All of this information is necessary for some kinds of science and therefore NASA doesn't want to lose any of this information.
-Buck
Wrong. The 10 to 20 minutes you speak of is the latency, however this 90 minute figure is probably arrived at by taking the size of the image and dividing by the 6mbps transfer rate. It will take 10-20 minutes after the first bits leave Mars and arrive at Earth, however after Earth sees the first bit they will still have to wait 90 minutes to see the last bit.
-Buck
Just so everyone knows, I tried to do something similar to this on my account. I did "Withdraw to bank account" for the full balance and then went to close the account. It then told me I cannot close the account right now as there is a pending withdrawal. I tried to cancel the withdrawal to see if there was an option to withdraw the balance on closing the account and found out that you cannot cancel a withdrawal once you have started it. I don't know if they offer a method to withdraw the amount automatically when you close the account but I just wanted to let everyone here know about these issues (the sneaky bastards probably just pocket the money if you don't withdraw it beforehand).
Anyway I plan to finalize the account closing process "in 3-5 buisiness days" when I get my monies. Hope enough people cancel all at once that they feel the sting.
-Buck
This is kind of a clever post, however I have to wonder why you didn't just post the .torrent file directly as they are normally plaintext and much shorter than the binary-ascii encoded e-mail file that you posted.
-Buck
Thank you for that, I will not search any further on that then. I had looked at the documentation quite a bit and saw no mention of it so I figured there must be a reason. I never really learned much about the inner workings of DNS, just what it does and the basics of how queries are resolved but not the details.
-Buck
I have noticed the same thing in my house. Our DNS server that we get from Qwest can take as much as 10-15 seconds to resolve DNS queries sometimes (this is not all the time but when it happens its a major pain). I have dnsmasq running on my Ubuntu box (which will use OpenDNS to resolve cache misses instead of the Qwest DNS server). This makes cache misses faster than they would have been anyway, and cache hits take 0ms. I have switched over all of the computers in the house (both Windows and Linux boxes) to resolve through this machine here and that works very nicely. An added benefit is that if I want to change from OpenDNS to something else I only have to change it in one place now. I definitely recommend doing this.
As the parent post mentions, websites don't change IP often enough for this to be a problem and therefore it makes sense to cache DNS for at least some length of time. DNSMasq seems to honor the keepalive times in the results it gets from upstream. Does anyone here know if there is a way to tell it to keep all entries for at least some length of time (e.g. 1 day) before considering the info stale? This would not only speed up lookups but would further reduce load on the upstream DNS server.
-Buck
I'm no fan of microsoft either however I think Linus really does have the interests of the kernel and the greater linux community at heart. I agree with him that we need to be very careful to make sure there are no potential licensing issues involved here but as long as the lawyers give it a good look and make sure there are no hidden patent claims, etc. then I think there is no reason not to include the code in the kernel.
-Buck
I wrestled with the idea for a minute or two and decided I would bite the bullet and take silverlight if I get to see the Feynman (I have been trying to find these videos for a long time, the DVD's are something like $800 if I remember correctly). However when I click the install thing I get "Sorry, your browser is not compatible".
I thought silverlight was supposed to be microsoft's answer to flash but I guess it will never be more than a curiosity/minor annoyance if they can't even be bothered to support firefox. Oh well, as someone above pointed out, torrents are undoubtedly on the way so I'll just have to wait a bit more.
-Buck
Apparently as of version 3.2.39 they have not. This is the first, and last, time I run code found in a slashdot sig without first analyzing what it does. At least it only required a reboot.
-Buck
This is of course the obvious reason to not be forthcoming with the list, however there is an implicit admission in this statement. If their filtering technology was worth a damn and not easily circumvented, it wouldn't matter who got their hands on the list as the content is blocked anyway.
Of course they are only responsible for blocking content in one country, or for one ISP, but what business is it of theirs if people use networks not under their jurisdiction to view material they are blocking for their clients.
-Buck
Thanks for the info.
-Buck
I realize the above is a troll but what is he referring to with the licensing fee? I've seen this in a few stories and have always wondered what it was.
-Buck
If I recall correctly this isn't the first code ATI has released and hopefully it won't be the last. I think we are beginning to see companies starting to realize that although there may not be a huge number of linux users, we sure do buy a lot of computer hardware.
-Buck
To me this seems like it could have really interesting implications for IO queuing algorithms. If this service has an algorithm that can accurately predict what data a game will need then the same technique could be applied to loading data for local applications from the hard drive.
-Buck