First of all, your 9 degrees F to -30 degrees F slide in a lifetime isn't realistic - the past few ice ages have slides of only something like 11 degrees Celcius / 20 degrees F, over several thousand years. Virginia wouldn't even average subzero (F) in an such an ice age. While we might need to adapt to an ice age eventually, global warming is the definite short-term worry.
Concern over global warming (in the short term) and concern over the next ice age (in the rather long term) aren't mutually exclusive. And we can do something about the former, which we're observing and understanding right now (and yes, we do understand it, the greenhouse effect hypothesis was around before new measurements and models and insights started providing confirming evidence). But we don't understand enough about ice ages - last I heard, they hadn't even agreed on whether the cause was orbital perturbations or what. Some people even think that the current carbon spike will totally demolish the next ice age (Wikipedia cites "Berger (EGU 2005 presentation)" as one such person).
I'm kinda assuming that you're talking about ice ages. Or maybe are you talking about the mid-20th-century-style hyped-up "Global Cooling"? Or "Day After Tomorrow"-style Hollywood imagination? Your posts are a little vague as to which one you're talking about.
Except that we do know what is causing the climate change (or, to be more exact, we have fairly high confidence that the greenhouse effect is correct). Science involves (hypothesis of causation + confirming observations = probable causation). The realization that carbon dioxide emissions might warm the troposphere is rather old, and new observations are confirming the correlation which was predicted by that hypothesis (to use the more-common wording). It's a bit irrelevant to play the "correlation != causation" card - nobody is actually arguing from that angle (well, except sometimes Al Gore - who thankfully won the peace prize, and not a science category, remember).
I'm a little scared that parent got modded up so high - I sense that there's a rather basic misunderstanding of the climate change issue there....
But I do think these concepts (especially the differences between science, math, and pseudoscience) should taught, and not left unsaid like they so often are... I know my high school never bothered with teaching the differences. I'm a little sad that Al Gore gets away with implying correlation=causation, no matter whether he's 'dumbing down' or if it's truly incorrect reasoning on his part.
Nope, these players fail to play *new features* on new discs....This only means that some extras are unavailable.... From TFA, the *correct* thing should be that only the new features are broken, but in reality, the entire thing is broken - some movies won't play, period.
TFA quotes:
a number of movies he purchased after buying his BD-P1200 wouldn't play
All the other telcom companies companies come under a massive DOS attack from the middle east / central asia and google wins at reserve price.:) ...but the telecom companies one-up by cutting the Middle East / Central Asia Internet link!:(:P
GUIs provide metaphors for users, they have no place in administration. I'm of the opinion that one should eat one's own dog food as much as possible - if you're providing GUIs to users then you should be working in that sort of environment. It helps one learn how the user thinks.
I'm not sure that impression is accurate. Dr. McGraw gave Cornell's Association of Computer Science Undergrads a presentation about this topic. (He used the same slides as those available here: http://www.usenix.org/events/sec07/tech/#thurs . I would recommend looking at that presentation, though I don't know how different it is from the one I saw.) He was representing his company, which audits code for security problems, and one of the main points of his talk was that all this stuff being used to make (or thwart) exploits in MMORPGs are also ideas that crop up in other applications. I thought the presentation was interesting and well-balanced, and, to me, it didn't come off as an attack on WoW at all.
He did admit to us that his pro-security books weren't selling much; apparently, people much rather learn via breaking other peoples' code than fixing their own. (Figures.)
The increased sales from referencing MMORPGs or WoW might well be padding his pockets, but if it's also helping people to write more-secure code, I say go for it.
Why was this nastiness modded up as insightful? Why not stop at media over-hyping (totally true, LL wasn't prepared to handle this) and go on to bash furry stereotypes (total flamebait)? Sure, it has a higher-than-normal proportion of users who happen to also be furries, but that hardly has anything to do with anything - who cares who's doing the overhype?
(You can mod me down for being offtopic, but I think this was worth pointing out.)
I don't think this as much stupidity as it seems. IIRC, Ginko happened when Second Life's viability was not at all certain. If you're not sure whether the entire currency is going to stick around, the additional risk in tossing the play money into a shady "bank" is pretty negligible.
Personally, when I asked around, it seemed like there were only a large number of small testing-the-waters deposits. The stuff in TFA about "lucky for only losing $144" has no evidence (and I'll bet that was the biggest number the reporter could find); everyone I actually knew who put L$ into Ginko put something less than US$10's worth in. Personally, I tossed Ginko US$3 to see what would actually happen to it, but I was truly expecting to lose it (at the time, either from "bank" failure or the failure of Second Life itself), and I bet that most other small-depositors were thinking the same way.
I'll admit that I was probably dumb for not yanking the money out when it became obvious that Second Life was going to stick around. Meh.
As an aside, the total amount "lost" seems impressive, but don't forget that the "bank"'s money multiplier was totally unrestricted. I wouldn't be surprised if US$700k in possibly-fictional deposits turns out to only be something like US$100k in actual Lindens lost - a big number still, but not as sensational. This is only 10000 people chipping in $10 each, which is not unrealistic.
If it's an "open source" search engine and anyone can go and read the source of how it operates, everyone will know the secret to rigging their pages...
...but there's a big difference between "knowing the secret" and actually being able to break it. A "the secret" to breaking RSA is factoring really big numbers, but you can't actually do that.
It sounds like the "secret" to breaking this new system, like Wikipedia, would be to overwhelm the community that is guarding the data. We know that Wikipedia is working fine (for the most part), but things get a bit more complicated with search. Wikipedia, at least, knows when every single edit occurs. But with a whitelist or "reputation" list of URLs, there's no notification when domains (or subdomains or such) change hands (I think?), and re-vetting too often is probably untenable. And you don't really want results based upon the URL's reliability of staying on the whitelist, people might want relevance based on the most-recent data right now, sometimes even if it might disappear under a nasty registration/subscription barrier in a week.
But we'll see whether Wales is onto something good here, I guess.:)
Serious professionals in the tech sector do *not* use "@gmail.com" email addresses. ...that's probably more accurate. I know of plenty of "professionals" in non-tech areas that use GMail, Hotmail, or even still AOL (gasp!). Plus, those who use GMail in the tech sector probably already know how to mask the fact that they use GMail, since you can use whatever domain name you want.
I recently encountered a similar situation - my mother had dropped her cell phone into the pool, and it wouldn't recognize any SIM cards anymore. She had "insurance" that sent her a replacement refurbished phone in exchange for sending the old phone back (but the premiums plus "deductible" would have been enough to cover the cost of the refurbished phone, and far too expensive to trade in the almost-working phone, so it was a terrible deal).
Unfortunately, she apparently had credit card info inside the phone somewhere (no, I don't know what she was thinking). I wasn't really comfortable with sending the phone like that through the mail, so we tried to get AT&T/Cingular to give up a way to unlock the phone to delete the card info or give us a way to perform a master reset (assuming that the functionality exists), but they refused. We sent it anyway, but I wish we could have at least reset the phone, if not kept it in its broken state (or maybe shown it to our local store that it was indeed broken or something...).
This sort of reminds me of Pullman's dæmons, which are kind of like life-long furry avatars of people in the Dark Materials universe. I think it'd be cool if we could have some sort of physical "avatar", albeit a robotic one not a living one as in the books. Considering that dæmons (in the books) are not really "avatars" but physical manifestations of one's soul (see Wikipedia article that parent refers to*), a programmed robotic thing would be a rather pathetic substitute!
I don't think anything (in my lifetime) will ever manage to directly tap into one's soul... So the closest one can get to simulating a person's dæmon, I think, would be to make the robot be controllable like a natural extension of the person's body, with a very natural interface (on the level of "direct connection into the brain"). The person would then has the responsibility for simulating their own division between dæmon and human, and determining what the dæmon's robot does. (This is also not likely to happen anytime soon, of course...)
(Off-topic side-note: Probably no one cares, but just in case someone gets me wrong, I'd like to clarify that I don't actually like the Dark Materials trilogy. Though I've read Pullman-related articles in Wikipedia and found some fascinating concepts like the aforementioned dæmons, I find the anti-Catholicism in the books extremely off-putting.) (From your comment I interpret that you haven't actually read the books. I'd suggest doing so - they're not really anti-Catholic unless one allows Catholicism to be defined by the politics of Vatican City (which some people do, and I won't argue with that). Personally, I would describe the books are more "anti-authoritarian-even-in-religious-contexts" - the general ideas apply towards Islamic states, for example. From my perspective, Catholicism was the most accessible one for Pullman to make an example of, and I'd hardly expect him to learn the political tendencies of, say, Islamic states, just for the sake of avoiding offending Catholic Christianity.*)
*Disclaimer: I edit the parent-linked wiki article regularly (but did not change the bit referenced by parent). Also, I'm a huge fan of the books, and am one of those few crazy people that claim to be able to split their internal monologues into dialogues with their dæmon. Also, these don't really disclaim anything.
If you take a look at the Second Life blog, you'll see that the referenced recommendation was from a couple of days ago (November 30). A paragraph in the blog seems to say that if LL starts noticing exploits, they'll kill all QuickTime on the grid and maybe roll back exploit-induced transactions - expect this to happen soon.
We do have the ability to turn off all videos on the grid, but have instead chosen to respect the existing in-world content and experiences which rely on streaming video, as we know that many of you enjoy these. We do recommend that you employ caution when using QuickTime in Second Life, only enabling it in environments that you trust, and are familiar with.
We are able to track attacks, and rest assured, if we discover a malicious stream, we will vigorously pursue the attacker. This will include account termination and legal action if appropriate, as well as the appropriate assistance for affected Residents.
Oops; I forgot to mention that their technical excuse includes 'we block stuff that isn't P2P, too, if they do lots of transmits', so they aren't really trying to block P2P, it's just a frequent victim. (I hope my first paragraph makes more sense now.)
It is important to note, however, that we never prevent P2P activity, or
block access to any P2P applications, but rather manage the network in
such a way that this activity does not degrade the broadband experience
for other users. Their technical excuse (see this George Ou blog post.) is that this is true - with current modems, cable cannot handle the number of simultaneous transmits required by, for example, torrent uploads. Like Ethernet on a shared wire, they say, cable modems send out requests to transmit on a bus, which can collide repeatedly and require lots of retransmission attempts, which apparently causes runaway queuing problems.
Personally, I don't really care whether the excuse true or not - I don't have empathy for "but my network can't handle it!". If someone buys Internet access and it is being used in good faith in accordance with spec, but the network breaks, the company should have to fix their network; the customer shouldn't need to adjust their usage. To me, it just so happens that the affected application is P2P.
I'm a little fuzzy on this, but I think they'd have to upgrade modems soon anyway to continue competing with FiOS? (Something about DOCSIS 3?) Also, I am still curious - can someone with knowledge of current cable protocols verify that the excuse is plausible?
...in case my meaning wasn't clear, "all websites" means all Thai websites, presumably including those sites that publish user-submitted data (i.e. social networking sites?), for some definition of "Thai website".
So the interesting questions I can think of are: is this retroactive to information already published, such that a site might have to verify the ages of existing users? Is the site responsible moderating content and users before potentially publishing personal info, or only remove things that they later find are personal info posted by minors? And will these sites be able to comply within a month?
They're stopping ISPs from... It's not just ISPs, but all websites. (The summary probably shouldn't have said "internet providers".) From TFA:
Local website operators will be given a one-month deadline to ensure the privacy of people under the age of 18 on the internet or face legal action. Deputy Prime Minister Paiboon Wattanasiritham said they must make sure that their websites displayed no personal information about under-18s in a way that would allow others to search the data to gain access to them.
This means (obviously) that there must be an easily accessible database tracking... caller history (to find out who you called, or called you) ...maybe the dead driver's cell phone, in this case?
I'm not sure if "it was thought to be a bad idea" is relevant here - if someone else thought of an innovation but then released it into the public domain, thinking that the idea couldn't be monetized, would someone else be able to patent that idea? (IANAL, but I doubt it...) And although the insight of easy-undo might possibly be innovative, "...and it can be undone easily" is not in the patent claim.
What's wrong with just "I see a ball of stuff and I'm measuring the size of the thing I can see"? That's a perfectly reasonable way to define angular diameter, and projecting this back to the actual position of the comet/Sun gives you an absolute diameter. It's not very useful, other than expressing the real size of the volume from which the photons are reaching one's eyes. But for people just looking up at the sky, they don't really care about other diameters, do they?
From http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~argon/nanoradio/radio.html:
Layla by Eric Clapton (Derek & the Dominos) was the first song played on the nanotube radio. The entire received song may be downloaded below. Oh, no! Quick, save all the content before the cease-and-desist letter!
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, your 9 degrees F to -30 degrees F slide in a lifetime isn't realistic - the past few ice ages have slides of only something like 11 degrees Celcius / 20 degrees F, over several thousand years. Virginia wouldn't even average subzero (F) in an such an ice age. While we might need to adapt to an ice age eventually, global warming is the definite short-term worry.
Concern over global warming (in the short term) and concern over the next ice age (in the rather long term) aren't mutually exclusive. And we can do something about the former, which we're observing and understanding right now (and yes, we do understand it, the greenhouse effect hypothesis was around before new measurements and models and insights started providing confirming evidence). But we don't understand enough about ice ages - last I heard, they hadn't even agreed on whether the cause was orbital perturbations or what. Some people even think that the current carbon spike will totally demolish the next ice age (Wikipedia cites "Berger (EGU 2005 presentation)" as one such person).
I'm kinda assuming that you're talking about ice ages. Or maybe are you talking about the mid-20th-century-style hyped-up "Global Cooling"? Or "Day After Tomorrow"-style Hollywood imagination? Your posts are a little vague as to which one you're talking about.
Can someone please enlighten me as to why the parent is modded 'insightful' instead of 'funny'?
Except that we do know what is causing the climate change (or, to be more exact, we have fairly high confidence that the greenhouse effect is correct). Science involves (hypothesis of causation + confirming observations = probable causation). The realization that carbon dioxide emissions might warm the troposphere is rather old, and new observations are confirming the correlation which was predicted by that hypothesis (to use the more-common wording). It's a bit irrelevant to play the "correlation != causation" card - nobody is actually arguing from that angle (well, except sometimes Al Gore - who thankfully won the peace prize, and not a science category, remember).
I'm a little scared that parent got modded up so high - I sense that there's a rather basic misunderstanding of the climate change issue there....
But I do think these concepts (especially the differences between science, math, and pseudoscience) should taught, and not left unsaid like they so often are... I know my high school never bothered with teaching the differences. I'm a little sad that Al Gore gets away with implying correlation=causation, no matter whether he's 'dumbing down' or if it's truly incorrect reasoning on his part.
(:P)
I'm not sure that impression is accurate. Dr. McGraw gave Cornell's Association of Computer Science Undergrads a presentation about this topic. (He used the same slides as those available here: http://www.usenix.org/events/sec07/tech/#thurs . I would recommend looking at that presentation, though I don't know how different it is from the one I saw.) He was representing his company, which audits code for security problems, and one of the main points of his talk was that all this stuff being used to make (or thwart) exploits in MMORPGs are also ideas that crop up in other applications. I thought the presentation was interesting and well-balanced, and, to me, it didn't come off as an attack on WoW at all.
He did admit to us that his pro-security books weren't selling much; apparently, people much rather learn via breaking other peoples' code than fixing their own. (Figures.)
The increased sales from referencing MMORPGs or WoW might well be padding his pockets, but if it's also helping people to write more-secure code, I say go for it.
Why was this nastiness modded up as insightful? Why not stop at media over-hyping (totally true, LL wasn't prepared to handle this) and go on to bash furry stereotypes (total flamebait)? Sure, it has a higher-than-normal proportion of users who happen to also be furries, but that hardly has anything to do with anything - who cares who's doing the overhype?
(You can mod me down for being offtopic, but I think this was worth pointing out.)
I don't think this as much stupidity as it seems. IIRC, Ginko happened when Second Life's viability was not at all certain. If you're not sure whether the entire currency is going to stick around, the additional risk in tossing the play money into a shady "bank" is pretty negligible.
Personally, when I asked around, it seemed like there were only a large number of small testing-the-waters deposits. The stuff in TFA about "lucky for only losing $144" has no evidence (and I'll bet that was the biggest number the reporter could find); everyone I actually knew who put L$ into Ginko put something less than US$10's worth in. Personally, I tossed Ginko US$3 to see what would actually happen to it, but I was truly expecting to lose it (at the time, either from "bank" failure or the failure of Second Life itself), and I bet that most other small-depositors were thinking the same way.
I'll admit that I was probably dumb for not yanking the money out when it became obvious that Second Life was going to stick around. Meh.
As an aside, the total amount "lost" seems impressive, but don't forget that the "bank"'s money multiplier was totally unrestricted. I wouldn't be surprised if US$700k in possibly-fictional deposits turns out to only be something like US$100k in actual Lindens lost - a big number still, but not as sensational. This is only 10000 people chipping in $10 each, which is not unrealistic.
...but there's a big difference between "knowing the secret" and actually being able to break it. A "the secret" to breaking RSA is factoring really big numbers, but you can't actually do that.
It sounds like the "secret" to breaking this new system, like Wikipedia, would be to overwhelm the community that is guarding the data. We know that Wikipedia is working fine (for the most part), but things get a bit more complicated with search. Wikipedia, at least, knows when every single edit occurs. But with a whitelist or "reputation" list of URLs, there's no notification when domains (or subdomains or such) change hands (I think?), and re-vetting too often is probably untenable. And you don't really want results based upon the URL's reliability of staying on the whitelist, people might want relevance based on the most-recent data right now, sometimes even if it might disappear under a nasty registration/subscription barrier in a week.
But we'll see whether Wales is onto something good here, I guess. :)
I recently encountered a similar situation - my mother had dropped her cell phone into the pool, and it wouldn't recognize any SIM cards anymore. She had "insurance" that sent her a replacement refurbished phone in exchange for sending the old phone back (but the premiums plus "deductible" would have been enough to cover the cost of the refurbished phone, and far too expensive to trade in the almost-working phone, so it was a terrible deal).
Unfortunately, she apparently had credit card info inside the phone somewhere (no, I don't know what she was thinking). I wasn't really comfortable with sending the phone like that through the mail, so we tried to get AT&T/Cingular to give up a way to unlock the phone to delete the card info or give us a way to perform a master reset (assuming that the functionality exists), but they refused. We sent it anyway, but I wish we could have at least reset the phone, if not kept it in its broken state (or maybe shown it to our local store that it was indeed broken or something...).
I don't think anything (in my lifetime) will ever manage to directly tap into one's soul... So the closest one can get to simulating a person's dæmon, I think, would be to make the robot be controllable like a natural extension of the person's body, with a very natural interface (on the level of "direct connection into the brain"). The person would then has the responsibility for simulating their own division between dæmon and human, and determining what the dæmon's robot does. (This is also not likely to happen anytime soon, of course...)
(Off-topic side-note: Probably no one cares, but just in case someone gets me wrong, I'd like to clarify that I don't actually like the Dark Materials trilogy. Though I've read Pullman-related articles in Wikipedia and found some fascinating concepts like the aforementioned dæmons, I find the anti-Catholicism in the books extremely off-putting.) (From your comment I interpret that you haven't actually read the books. I'd suggest doing so - they're not really anti-Catholic unless one allows Catholicism to be defined by the politics of Vatican City (which some people do, and I won't argue with that). Personally, I would describe the books are more "anti-authoritarian-even-in-religious-contexts" - the general ideas apply towards Islamic states, for example. From my perspective, Catholicism was the most accessible one for Pullman to make an example of, and I'd hardly expect him to learn the political tendencies of, say, Islamic states, just for the sake of avoiding offending Catholic Christianity.*)*Disclaimer: I edit the parent-linked wiki article regularly (but did not change the bit referenced by parent). Also, I'm a huge fan of the books, and am one of those few crazy people that claim to be able to split their internal monologues into dialogues with their dæmon. Also, these don't really disclaim anything.
We are able to track attacks, and rest assured, if we discover a malicious stream, we will vigorously pursue the attacker. This will include account termination and legal action if appropriate, as well as the appropriate assistance for affected Residents.
Oops; I forgot to mention that their technical excuse includes 'we block stuff that isn't P2P, too, if they do lots of transmits', so they aren't really trying to block P2P, it's just a frequent victim. (I hope my first paragraph makes more sense now.)
Personally, I don't really care whether the excuse true or not - I don't have empathy for "but my network can't handle it!". If someone buys Internet access and it is being used in good faith in accordance with spec, but the network breaks, the company should have to fix their network; the customer shouldn't need to adjust their usage. To me, it just so happens that the affected application is P2P.
I'm a little fuzzy on this, but I think they'd have to upgrade modems soon anyway to continue competing with FiOS? (Something about DOCSIS 3?) Also, I am still curious - can someone with knowledge of current cable protocols verify that the excuse is plausible?
...in case my meaning wasn't clear, "all websites" means all Thai websites, presumably including those sites that publish user-submitted data (i.e. social networking sites?), for some definition of "Thai website".
So the interesting questions I can think of are: is this retroactive to information already published, such that a site might have to verify the ages of existing users? Is the site responsible moderating content and users before potentially publishing personal info, or only remove things that they later find are personal info posted by minors? And will these sites be able to comply within a month?
I'm not sure if "it was thought to be a bad idea" is relevant here - if someone else thought of an innovation but then released it into the public domain, thinking that the idea couldn't be monetized, would someone else be able to patent that idea? (IANAL, but I doubt it...) And although the insight of easy-undo might possibly be innovative, "...and it can be undone easily" is not in the patent claim.
What's wrong with just "I see a ball of stuff and I'm measuring the size of the thing I can see"? That's a perfectly reasonable way to define angular diameter, and projecting this back to the actual position of the comet/Sun gives you an absolute diameter. It's not very useful, other than expressing the real size of the volume from which the photons are reaching one's eyes. But for people just looking up at the sky, they don't really care about other diameters, do they?
To be honest, I also found it difficult to locate any "financial disclosure statement", because I presumed it was lawyerese and googled for the exact phrase. (The real lawyerese is apparently "Independant Auditors' Report and Consolidated Financial Statements".)
:P )
(Can't you just call us stupid rather than malicious?
Hey, it's even resistant to typos! I got "terson reported", typed in "tersonn reportted", and it said "Correct!". ...hey, wait a minute....