Er, that analogy doesn't really address my question - I was asking specifically about this vulnerability that GP says needs someone "on the local LAN".
So on $400 an $11 markup is gouging? I want to shop where YOU shop.
I wanted to point out that those numbers are $11 billion per quarter and $400 billion per year. The correct numbers are $11.68b profit this quarter, on $138b revenue this quarter.
AND, do you want to know who's #2 in the 'record profits' field? Is it Shell, Conoco, etc? Nope, it's Walmart. Look it up.
If you were really concerned about us solving our energy problems, you'd actually let us solve them. We've got plenty of ways to do it... more drilling, more shale, more coal to gasoline, more nuclear... liberals just don't like those options. What you're really mad about is that we won't do it your way... with nothing but biofuels and electric cars.
Indeed, you're pretty much correct*. If you hadn't noticed, there's this other certain problem called "greenhouse gas emission" that needs solving too. Might as well solve everything at once, no? Are you really opposed to solving both problems with a single well-thought-out solution, instead of overhauling energy once in the short term and once again in the longer term?
*Except for the nuclear part; liberals are starting to warm up to it. It's clean, but it still has a lot of NIMBY factor.
If you really want to think long-term, the country should hoard our oil and leave it in the ground, until we don't need it and there's basically none left in the world. Then we sell it for thousands and thousands of dollars per barrel to the poor suckers that still require it. Considering the residual demand for COBOL programmers (despite how specialized they were), I'm sure we'll have no problem fetching high prices for something as currently ubiquitous as oil in the future.
Personally, I have never seen any evidence for a "liberal bias" per se, especially not at the moment. Recently there was some news giving evidence of conservative bias even when they are crying "liberal bias" (three news programs, I think it was something like ABC/CBS/NBC, gave more negative statements on Obama than McCain, while McCain's campaign was complaining of bias towards Obama). And with all the attention given to (for example) "intellectual design", criticism of scientists, and the lack of coverage over Afghanistan or Darfur or New Orleans, I'm finding outright "liberal bias" very difficult to believe. Personally, I think there's an "underdog bias" or a "horserace bias" - swing states, intellectual design, maybe the Democrats when the Republicans were in power, and so on. The media loves a horserace.
The cynic in me suspects that the "liberal bias" mantra is so often repeated to pull "unbiased" towards the right, and try to get more media airtime than their ideas would otherwise deserve. And I expect a counter from the Democrats soon.
I think this betrays a common misunderstanding of science, due to it so often being glossed over. Science aims to find truth, but the methods involved cannot "prove" a hypothesis is true. It can only disprove. So, I think the best scientists can do is to try to get:
1) Truth, or
2) Something close enough to the truth that they cannot (yet) distinguish it from truth, or
3) A useful (quick) approximation of the truth.
Obviously, #1 and #2 can't really be distinguished from each other. The conclusion of the Greeks falls under number two (though perhaps number three if they in fact knew it was just a calculator). When people talk about science "proving" something, it's probably based on this sort of metric, plus "and we can't think of any better explanation that isn't overly contorted" (for more on "isn't overly contorted", see Occaam's Razor).
Global climate simulations fall under number three, and are different beasts than the pursuit of exact truth. Nobody is saying that the climate simulations are providing exact predictions - they are providing useful, fast approximations. Fortunately, we know how to calculate the accuracy of the models, so we can quantify this uncertainty and get "x% certain".
You're also saying that people should be skeptical because people can't always be certain that scientists have their underlying understanding correct. Philosophically, you're right in a way - we can't really know this uncertainty, because it requires extrapolation into things we haven't conceived yet (so that we can tell the difference between truth and our current best theory). But it's folly to act on anything other than the best information you currently have. Your last statement basically means, "to our best knowledge, with 90+% probability, the climate will warm considerably if we don't stop pumping out carbon dioxide, but since there's a chance we might be wrong about our model of the atmosphere, we should disregard this prediction". This is like saying, "to my best knowledge, going to Las Vegas casinos is a bad investment strategy, but since I'm not sure whether I understand the underlying algorithm for the slot machines, I'm going to disregard my prediction." I don't know if that seems absurd to you (I'm sure somebody out there gambles with this justification), but it sure seems absurd to me. It's nice to hindcast and consider yourself superior ("hey, that bank of slot machines was using a version of OpenSSL with the bad random number generator, we could have made millions on those machines!"), but any expectation of benefiting from such results through luck is foolish.
(FYI, the "heliocentric" model is just a very useful approximation, too. The Sun is in fact in an accelerating frame of motion around the center of the galaxy, and perhaps the galaxy too around some larger structures. I hear that we can't predict the location of Earth in its orbit at approximately a million years out. Better throw away that calendar for the year 1253135, eh?)
The school system is not meant as a replacement for parents' individual attention/intervention and life lessons. If you try to put this reponsibility on the schools, well, what if parents think they're doing it "the wrong way"? And if there aren't any parents, then that's the job of foster care or guardianship. Schools can only give you book learning "over and above the parents", not individual mentoring. If your parents suck at that, well, sorry, but those are the parents you were born to.... (Foster care or guardianship is a different, longer story.)
This isn't a good idea at all; funny, not insightful. It would throw the current checks and balances totally out of kilter. The Supreme Court would effectively become a third house of the legislature, with veto power, except appointed and holding office for life, plus allowed to throw any legislators into jail they wanted (or at least make them afraid to show up, lest that happen). Allow any one party to hold onto the other two branches for a decade or two (or an unlucky term where a majority of the justices die), and they'll be able to hold onto legislative power for a generation. And I'm sure an actual government scholar can poke more holes in this than I can.
Seems to me that "parents need to take responsibility" is all to easy to use as an excuse for the flaws in the system. At least, easier than actually trying to fix the flaws.
On the contrary, it seems to me that it's arguing that parents not being part of the system is itself a flaw of the system.
Kaminsky posted a test to see whether your DNS server is still vulnerable (it seems that you'll need to allow scripts from toorrr.com). If the server is vulnerable, he appears to be recommending OpenDNS as a stopgap measure. Their nameservers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 .
If you're really paranoid, switch to OpenDNS first before running the test...
On a related note, doxpara.com = 66.240.226.139 , but I can't get anything but a 404 at the IP address. Should I be nervous?
According to the "confirmed" post by Thomas Dullien aka Halvar Flake (found via this PCWorld article), the problem might be even simpler than that. He issues requests for some non-existent domain in.com, instead of a non-existent subdomain in the domain you're attacking.
Can anyone confirm, or must it be subdomains?
But how long will they stay in power using the slogan: We cost you more at the pump so that the environment will be preserved.
It appears that people really don't mind it that much. Actually, it seems like people are willing enough that both major U.S. parties are willing to sing the slogan. Last I checked, cap-and-trade on carbon dioxide (a much more explicit "environmental tax") had very strong support - a quick search for "cap and trade support" turns up McCain and even ExxonMobil near the top, and Obama supports it too.
That drives technological growth in zinc extraction, bringing the price back down. Alternately, it drives some of the existing buyers to alternatives, leaving only those that really need it. Alternately, it also makes currently uneconomical mines (such as current waste dumps) economical, increasing supply at the higher price.... The danger is government involvement - since you bring up oil, much of the current cost of oil is due to anti-oil lobbying preventing the "new" oil technologies being implemented. The Democrats are essentially preventing oil-shale (and, of course, offshore drilling) in the US.
Well, since you list three "alternates" up there, it sounds like the Democrats are leveraging the economics to drive "some of the existing buyers to alternatives, leaving only those that really need it". Not a bad decision, I think - not just for the environmental concerns, but also the "it's better to burn someone else's oil when it's cheap and sell/use our own only when it's super expensive" argument.
The current money system in most countries today is far more insidious than that, allowing banks to lawfully lend out money(debt) created from nothing. Yes, they need some money deposited, but it is far less than what is lent out.
This isn't quite right, though it might just be a vocabulary thing. To clarify: any single bank does need to loan out less than they get in deposits - but the money they loan out ends up re-deposited in a bank again, and then it can be loaned out a second time (and third, and fourth). Thus everyone's accounts end up with money that represents someone else's debt. For example: Suppose banks can loan out 80% of their deposits. Person A deposits $100 of "original" money into bank X. Bank X loans out $80 to B. B buys $80 worth of stuff from C. C deposits the $80 ('created' by the loan to B) into bank Y. Y only sees $80 of "deposits" - it's not marked as "loaned money" or any such thing - so Y can loan out $64 to D. D buys stuff from E. E deposits the money in Bank Z. There's already $144 "created" from the original $100 ($100 in A's bank account, $80 in C's account, $64 in E's account). Z loans out E's deposit. Etc, etc.
Of course, the sum of a geometric series is bounded, so there's a limit to the amount of money 'created' this way. And nowadays, every economist knows this already, and should be already taking this into account when they think about anything involving the money supply. It's not really "insidious" anymore, just counter-intuitive.
He flip-flopped and is exactly what the summary says. Did I miss something?
Yes. The summary says "supports telecom amnesty", which is (at best) an exaggeration. The spin makes things sound more like maliciousness than ambivalence or incompetence. (I don't like his lack of backbone on this issue, but it's 'just' a lack of backbone, i.e. it's not like he would start campaigning in support of telecom amnesty.)
I think you're confusing subliminal effects from advertising and advertising via "subliminal messages". We're talking about the former, not the latter. Do you think the average Joe sees a Pepsi ad and realizes that "oh, they're just trying to associate Pepsi with celebrity status and coolness; there's nothing of substance in this ad"?
In fact, I think this was not really an experiment at all; there was no formality in setting and regulating variables and controls. This was "real-world", using the author's actual pattern of browsing - an anecdote with pretty graphs. It has some value, but the article makes itself sound more scientific than it deserves.
That said, there's still other evidence that Firefox 3 uses the least memory out of these browsers (i.e. the tests where "people load hundreds of web pages, sometimes at the same time" as mentioned in TFA). For example, here's one with Fx2, Fx3, and IE7.
Can you not see that the person you're replying to insisted that this isn't a closed system?...It's a poorly explained system. It's probably something like this [isa.org].... Eventually, you pay for it when you recycle the aluminum in the linked case. This got me thinking about where the "water-powered" comes from. Your link does violate the description of "water-powered" taken literally, which implies net reaction of water -> energy + waste. It seems more like a net of aluminum -> energy + waste, i.e. "aluminum-powered". The water does not 'power' anything, and is better thought of as part of the motor, kinda like motor oil. (For current cars, you don't usually think of motor oil as the "power" source, even though it is slowly consumed in running the engine.) If you're analyzing where the energy comes from, the best description is 'aluminum-powered'.
I suppose, though, that the water might need replacement or replenishment. If the car recycles the water, replacing the water might not need to happen for a while. But perhaps this car doesn't try to recycle the water at all, and thus needs to replenish the water more than it needs to replenish the fuel? Then the best way to explain maintenance to non-geeks is to replace gasoline with water, i.e. "fuel up with water, and just do this maintenance package every few weeks". Then they might try to market it as "water-powered", though it's condescending and has a tendency to backfire (obviously).
Google more than sure doesn't give a cent about P2P applications, so their app probably will only work for http throttling, namely flv streaming/youtube. Why wouldn't they care about P2P? If they can keep P2P tech evolving until it's mature enough to distribute Youtube videos on them, that translates into free bandwidth and service. I think there's already a lot of movement towards this - see P4P, Vuze, even NASA TV is piloting peer-to-peer distribution of its broadcast.
Indeed, the Google message actually recommends Foxmarks, if you read the article. It also recommends Mozilla Weave and Google Toolbar as bookmark-syncing alternatives (well, once Google Toolbar gets Firefox 3 compatibility). Mozilla Weave might not even be considered "third party".
That terminating single quote in the summary is awfully easy to miss... (Bad submitter, bad!)
I've seen a few attempts to make this happen, but it seems that the most open virtual world we have now is Second Life, which is entirely controlled by the whim of one company (Linden Labs). Where's my general-purpose, open source Virtual World Browser? Why can't I simply walk from one "virtual site" to another -- each controlled, run, and maintained by different people? People (including Linden Lab) are working towards this, and are having some preliminary successes. (For context there, OpenSim is an open-source implementation of the Second Life server, which hasn't been opened by Linden Lab, yet.)
I mean they literally got into an argument over whether or not the resizing of that box was allowed. It's actually much easier to spark a big argument over something trivial than something complex. See the bike shed story, which better read in full than any summary I can make. (Pst, if you don't like the colors, turn on javascript and refresh.:) )
Slashdot Mirror
For instance, what do you think of NPR's recent series on health care in other countries?
Are you asking me personally? I'm not familiar with it, sorry.
Er, that analogy doesn't really address my question - I was asking specifically about this vulnerability that GP says needs someone "on the local LAN".
Which means that unless the attacker is on the local LAN there's no mechanism to see the queries.
Out of curiosity, what about public Wi-Fi? Wouldn't people (normally) expect their https connection to their bank to be okay?
So on $400 an $11 markup is gouging? I want to shop where YOU shop.
I wanted to point out that those numbers are $11 billion per quarter and $400 billion per year. The correct numbers are $11.68b profit this quarter, on $138b revenue this quarter.
AND, do you want to know who's #2 in the 'record profits' field? Is it Shell, Conoco, etc? Nope, it's Walmart. Look it up.
I looked it up and you are incorrect. As of April 2008, the number two spot, sorted by profits, is indeed Royal Dutch Shell. Walmart is way down there at #19 (you'll have to count). See http://www.forbes.com/lists/2008/18/biz_2000global08_The-Global-2000_Prof.html .
If you were really concerned about us solving our energy problems, you'd actually let us solve them. We've got plenty of ways to do it... more drilling, more shale, more coal to gasoline, more nuclear... liberals just don't like those options. What you're really mad about is that we won't do it your way... with nothing but biofuels and electric cars.
Indeed, you're pretty much correct*. If you hadn't noticed, there's this other certain problem called "greenhouse gas emission" that needs solving too. Might as well solve everything at once, no? Are you really opposed to solving both problems with a single well-thought-out solution, instead of overhauling energy once in the short term and once again in the longer term?
*Except for the nuclear part; liberals are starting to warm up to it. It's clean, but it still has a lot of NIMBY factor.
If you really want to think long-term, the country should hoard our oil and leave it in the ground, until we don't need it and there's basically none left in the world. Then we sell it for thousands and thousands of dollars per barrel to the poor suckers that still require it. Considering the residual demand for COBOL programmers (despite how specialized they were), I'm sure we'll have no problem fetching high prices for something as currently ubiquitous as oil in the future.
Personally, I have never seen any evidence for a "liberal bias" per se, especially not at the moment. Recently there was some news giving evidence of conservative bias even when they are crying "liberal bias" (three news programs, I think it was something like ABC/CBS/NBC, gave more negative statements on Obama than McCain, while McCain's campaign was complaining of bias towards Obama). And with all the attention given to (for example) "intellectual design", criticism of scientists, and the lack of coverage over Afghanistan or Darfur or New Orleans, I'm finding outright "liberal bias" very difficult to believe. Personally, I think there's an "underdog bias" or a "horserace bias" - swing states, intellectual design, maybe the Democrats when the Republicans were in power, and so on. The media loves a horserace.
The cynic in me suspects that the "liberal bias" mantra is so often repeated to pull "unbiased" towards the right, and try to get more media airtime than their ideas would otherwise deserve. And I expect a counter from the Democrats soon.
I think this betrays a common misunderstanding of science, due to it so often being glossed over. Science aims to find truth, but the methods involved cannot "prove" a hypothesis is true. It can only disprove. So, I think the best scientists can do is to try to get:
1) Truth, or
2) Something close enough to the truth that they cannot (yet) distinguish it from truth, or
3) A useful (quick) approximation of the truth.
Obviously, #1 and #2 can't really be distinguished from each other. The conclusion of the Greeks falls under number two (though perhaps number three if they in fact knew it was just a calculator). When people talk about science "proving" something, it's probably based on this sort of metric, plus "and we can't think of any better explanation that isn't overly contorted" (for more on "isn't overly contorted", see Occaam's Razor).
Global climate simulations fall under number three, and are different beasts than the pursuit of exact truth. Nobody is saying that the climate simulations are providing exact predictions - they are providing useful, fast approximations. Fortunately, we know how to calculate the accuracy of the models, so we can quantify this uncertainty and get "x% certain".
You're also saying that people should be skeptical because people can't always be certain that scientists have their underlying understanding correct. Philosophically, you're right in a way - we can't really know this uncertainty, because it requires extrapolation into things we haven't conceived yet (so that we can tell the difference between truth and our current best theory). But it's folly to act on anything other than the best information you currently have. Your last statement basically means, "to our best knowledge, with 90+% probability, the climate will warm considerably if we don't stop pumping out carbon dioxide, but since there's a chance we might be wrong about our model of the atmosphere, we should disregard this prediction". This is like saying, "to my best knowledge, going to Las Vegas casinos is a bad investment strategy, but since I'm not sure whether I understand the underlying algorithm for the slot machines, I'm going to disregard my prediction." I don't know if that seems absurd to you (I'm sure somebody out there gambles with this justification), but it sure seems absurd to me. It's nice to hindcast and consider yourself superior ("hey, that bank of slot machines was using a version of OpenSSL with the bad random number generator, we could have made millions on those machines!"), but any expectation of benefiting from such results through luck is foolish.
(FYI, the "heliocentric" model is just a very useful approximation, too. The Sun is in fact in an accelerating frame of motion around the center of the galaxy, and perhaps the galaxy too around some larger structures. I hear that we can't predict the location of Earth in its orbit at approximately a million years out. Better throw away that calendar for the year 1253135, eh?)
The school system is not meant as a replacement for parents' individual attention/intervention and life lessons. If you try to put this reponsibility on the schools, well, what if parents think they're doing it "the wrong way"? And if there aren't any parents, then that's the job of foster care or guardianship. Schools can only give you book learning "over and above the parents", not individual mentoring. If your parents suck at that, well, sorry, but those are the parents you were born to.... (Foster care or guardianship is a different, longer story.)
This isn't a good idea at all; funny, not insightful. It would throw the current checks and balances totally out of kilter. The Supreme Court would effectively become a third house of the legislature, with veto power, except appointed and holding office for life, plus allowed to throw any legislators into jail they wanted (or at least make them afraid to show up, lest that happen). Allow any one party to hold onto the other two branches for a decade or two (or an unlucky term where a majority of the justices die), and they'll be able to hold onto legislative power for a generation. And I'm sure an actual government scholar can poke more holes in this than I can.
Seems to me that "parents need to take responsibility" is all to easy to use as an excuse for the flaws in the system. At least, easier than actually trying to fix the flaws.
On the contrary, it seems to me that it's arguing that parents not being part of the system is itself a flaw of the system.
I'm pretty sure that's COPPA, not COPA. The former protects privacy, the latter from sex.
Kaminsky posted a test to see whether your DNS server is still vulnerable (it seems that you'll need to allow scripts from toorrr.com). If the server is vulnerable, he appears to be recommending OpenDNS as a stopgap measure. Their nameservers are 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 .
If you're really paranoid, switch to OpenDNS first before running the test...
On a related note, doxpara.com = 66.240.226.139 , but I can't get anything but a 404 at the IP address. Should I be nervous?
According to the "confirmed" post by Thomas Dullien aka Halvar Flake (found via this PCWorld article), the problem might be even simpler than that. He issues requests for some non-existent domain in .com, instead of a non-existent subdomain in the domain you're attacking.
Can anyone confirm, or must it be subdomains?
But how long will they stay in power using the slogan: We cost you more at the pump so that the environment will be preserved.
It appears that people really don't mind it that much. Actually, it seems like people are willing enough that both major U.S. parties are willing to sing the slogan. Last I checked, cap-and-trade on carbon dioxide (a much more explicit "environmental tax") had very strong support - a quick search for "cap and trade support" turns up McCain and even ExxonMobil near the top, and Obama supports it too.
That drives technological growth in zinc extraction, bringing the price back down. Alternately, it drives some of the existing buyers to alternatives, leaving only those that really need it. Alternately, it also makes currently uneconomical mines (such as current waste dumps) economical, increasing supply at the higher price. ... The danger is government involvement - since you bring up oil, much of the current cost of oil is due to anti-oil lobbying preventing the "new" oil technologies being implemented. The Democrats are essentially preventing oil-shale (and, of course, offshore drilling) in the US.
Well, since you list three "alternates" up there, it sounds like the Democrats are leveraging the economics to drive "some of the existing buyers to alternatives, leaving only those that really need it". Not a bad decision, I think - not just for the environmental concerns, but also the "it's better to burn someone else's oil when it's cheap and sell/use our own only when it's super expensive" argument.
The current money system in most countries today is far more insidious than that, allowing banks to lawfully lend out money(debt) created from nothing. Yes, they need some money deposited, but it is far less than what is lent out.
This isn't quite right, though it might just be a vocabulary thing. To clarify: any single bank does need to loan out less than they get in deposits - but the money they loan out ends up re-deposited in a bank again, and then it can be loaned out a second time (and third, and fourth). Thus everyone's accounts end up with money that represents someone else's debt. For example: Suppose banks can loan out 80% of their deposits. Person A deposits $100 of "original" money into bank X. Bank X loans out $80 to B. B buys $80 worth of stuff from C. C deposits the $80 ('created' by the loan to B) into bank Y. Y only sees $80 of "deposits" - it's not marked as "loaned money" or any such thing - so Y can loan out $64 to D. D buys stuff from E. E deposits the money in Bank Z. There's already $144 "created" from the original $100 ($100 in A's bank account, $80 in C's account, $64 in E's account). Z loans out E's deposit. Etc, etc.
Of course, the sum of a geometric series is bounded, so there's a limit to the amount of money 'created' this way. And nowadays, every economist knows this already, and should be already taking this into account when they think about anything involving the money supply. It's not really "insidious" anymore, just counter-intuitive.
He flip-flopped and is exactly what the summary says. Did I miss something?
Yes. The summary says "supports telecom amnesty", which is (at best) an exaggeration. The spin makes things sound more like maliciousness than ambivalence or incompetence. (I don't like his lack of backbone on this issue, but it's 'just' a lack of backbone, i.e. it's not like he would start campaigning in support of telecom amnesty.)
I think you're confusing subliminal effects from advertising and advertising via "subliminal messages". We're talking about the former, not the latter. Do you think the average Joe sees a Pepsi ad and realizes that "oh, they're just trying to associate Pepsi with celebrity status and coolness; there's nothing of substance in this ad"?
In fact, I think this was not really an experiment at all; there was no formality in setting and regulating variables and controls. This was "real-world", using the author's actual pattern of browsing - an anecdote with pretty graphs. It has some value, but the article makes itself sound more scientific than it deserves.
That said, there's still other evidence that Firefox 3 uses the least memory out of these browsers (i.e. the tests where "people load hundreds of web pages, sometimes at the same time" as mentioned in TFA). For example, here's one with Fx2, Fx3, and IE7.
I suppose, though, that the water might need replacement or replenishment. If the car recycles the water, replacing the water might not need to happen for a while. But perhaps this car doesn't try to recycle the water at all, and thus needs to replenish the water more than it needs to replenish the fuel? Then the best way to explain maintenance to non-geeks is to replace gasoline with water, i.e. "fuel up with water, and just do this maintenance package every few weeks". Then they might try to market it as "water-powered", though it's condescending and has a tendency to backfire (obviously).
But this is just speculation.
Indeed, the Google message actually recommends Foxmarks, if you read the article. It also recommends Mozilla Weave and Google Toolbar as bookmark-syncing alternatives (well, once Google Toolbar gets Firefox 3 compatibility). Mozilla Weave might not even be considered "third party".
That terminating single quote in the summary is awfully easy to miss... (Bad submitter, bad!)