A guy at my university put together a (fairly basic) interactive website with a slightly inventive concept a year or so ago - it got some good publicity, then was taken down by the university, causing a controversy that netted him much, much more publicity.
Oh, FitFinder, done by someone at University College, London. Now if that had happened at Stanford, the student would have been hooked up with a venture capitalist and encouraged.
Stanford is really a venture capital and real estate firm which runs a university as a sideline. In 1992, Stanford University spun off the management of its endowment to the Stanford Management Company. They set up shop at 2770 Sand Hill Road, which is where almost all the Silicon Valley venture capitalists have their headquarters. Within a few years, Stanford was investing in venture capital funds, executives were moving between the academic business unit and the financial unit, and Stanford was turning into a major player in the VC industry.
Stanford actively helps to create startups and takes equity stakes in them. Stanford owns part of Cisco, part of Yahoo, part of Google, etc. They're not just a passive investor, like most universities.
core language doesn't bother with safety, which makes it fast.
That's a popular misconception of C and C++ programmers. There are modern hard-compiled languages with memory safety. Modula 3 (which, sadly, died with DEC), Erlang (popular in telephony, where speed really matters), and even Delphi (which sank with Borland) had decent solutions to the safety problem without speed penalties. Go is the coming safe language that goes fast.
(If you're not familiar with the technical issues, the basic problem with C is that you have to lie to the language about arrays. The "pointer = array" concept means that you tell the compiler you're passing an object by reference when you're in fact passing an array by reference. You can't even express in the language that you're passing an array. So the compiler can't tell what you're doing and check it. This is the underlying language flaw which allows buffer overflows. Microsoft kludged up something called "Standard Annotation Language" to deal with this lack of expressive power, developed some tools that use it, and they find it useful. But as a language bolt-on, it's limited.)
Pushing the safety problem up to a macro level (where templates live) just pastes wallpaper over the mold at the bottom. The mold always seeps through, because too many things still require raw pointers.
Every day, millions of program crashes occur because of this.
Dear Larry, Sergey, Eric, Mark, Jerry, and friends:
If the brightest idea all your super-smart people can come up with is to interpose yourselves into every interaction a human being is involved in on the internet, then we don't need your kind of economic engine.
The stock market agrees. Google's stock peaked in late 2007. It's now about 25% below the peak. It's not the recession; GOOG has underperformed the DJIA and the NASDAQ since 2007. Google is frantically trying to diversify into something else that makes money. But it's not working. Revenue is still around 97% ads. Revenue is growing, but expenses on all those money losing "products" are growing faster. YouTube is profitable, but only because it's been turned into an ad farm.
Thus the importance of "tracking" to Google. It's their edge in the ad business. If they lose the privilege of tracking their users and exploiting that information for advertising purposes, their margins on advertising will go down. And that's all that brings in money.
""+" doesn't append _two numbers_, but it can append _number to string_
In every other language I've seen, the CORRECTly expected result is 11 or error. Perl, C++, etc. The point is that you can never trust your input if you are expecting numeric.
It's also wrong in Python, in an even worse way. The problem began with using "+" for concatenation. Concatenation works on sequences, so [1,2] + [3,4] in Python is [1,2,3,4], which is not what one might expect. Worse, Python has both sequences and numeric arrays (as part of the standard NumPy math package), and numeric arrays have different semantics. Adding numeric arrays with "+" has numerical semantics - you get a vector addition. Still worse, mixed mode addition between sequences and numeric arrays is allowed. (Discovering the semantics of that is left to the reader.)
Then this was generalized to multiplication. In Python, "[1,2] * 2" is [1,2,1,2]. Ulp.
This is a non-trivial design error in Python. Python functions are essentially generic, This allows some functions designed for scalars to generalize to complex numbers and vectors. It's thus quite reasonable for someone to use either a list of numbers or a numeric array as an argument to the same function. That produces unexpected results, often without raising an error exception.
This is one of the standard language designer errors. The other classic is not putting in a "bool" type at the beginning. Retrofitting one later never quite works right, because mixed-mode integer and bool semantics get ugly. C and Python both retrofitted bool types, and the dents still show. Mathematically, for Booleans, "+" should be OR, and "*" should be AND. If you don't like that, they should be errors. In Python, "True + True" is 2.
This was more significant in the pre-USB 2.0 era. It's now possible to get USB interfaces to almost anything. It used to be that your choices were a serial port, a parallel port, a data acquisition board, or custom hardware. Now there's usually some inexpensive USB device that will do the job.
It's hard to find low-cost devices which provide 50MHz digital in/out ports. There are lots of USB to digital I/O interface devices, but only a few can reach even 40MHz. If you don't need that much speed, though, a USB device will be simpler to deal with. And you'll be able to do something else on the main CPU while driving the I/O device.
The C++ standards committee has been lost in template la-la land for the last decade. They've focused on features understood by few and used correctly in production code by fewer. Since the discovery that the C++ template system could be abused as a term-rewriting system to perform arbitrary computations at run-time, that concept has received far too much attention. It's an ugly way to program, but it's "l33t". On the other hand, they've been unable to fix any of the fundamental safety problems in the language. C++ is unique among mainstream languages in providing hiding ("abstraction") without memory safety. (C has neither, Simula, Pascal, Ada, Java, Delphi, Erlang, Haskell, Go, and all the "scripting languages" have both.) So there's an example of a committee screwing up.
On the Python side, we have von Rossum. The problem there is that he likes features that are easy to implement in his CPython implementation, which is a naive interpreter, even if they inhibit most attempts at optimization. As a result, Python isn't much faster than it was a decade ago, and is still about 60x slower than C. Attempts to speed it up have either failed or resulted in insanely complex, yet still sluggish, implementations. So that's the "guru" approach.
You have to use your secret military advantage to get value from it. The time to do that is when taking out the target is worth more than keeping the secret.
This op was worth it.
"Those five thousand ships, you say the Allies can't possibly have, they've got them! " - Maj. Werner Pluskat, defensive bunker, Normandy coast, June 6, 1944.
There are many littleARMboards, some of which are priced as low as $39 in quantity 1. These are useful for applications where the ATMega in an Arduno is too limiting.
The choice of peripherals these guys made is unusual. With a USB port and an HDMI port, you can build a game machine, which is probably what they had in mind. Most such boards are more suited to embedded applications, and have I/O - digital TTL ports, Ethernet, LCD drive, etc.
A problem with these minimal machines is deciding what to put on them. The lowest-price devices tend to have too little of some resource and too much of something you don't need. This leads to a proliferation of little embedded boards with slightly different options, which runs the cost back up.
For hobbyists, the Leaflands Maple may be interesting. It's an ARM board in the Arduno form factor. It's compatible with Arduno daughter boards ("shields"), and has some commonality with the Arduno development environment. Not enough memory to run Linux, though.
The $25 price is a vaporware price - they're not actually shipping. NXP is shipping LPCExpresso for "under $30", and that includes the entire tool chain (Eclipse, GCC, JTAG debugger, etc.)
Never mind the fact that not a single cause of fraud has been associated with the intrusion...
We don't know that. In fact, Sony wouldn't know that unless VISA International tells them.
The fraud may have taken place before the Sony break-in was discovered.
It takes a billing cycle or two before phony charges become clear, as customers complain.
Somewhere in VISA International, claims from consumers to their banks about false charges are being correlated against the list of compromised cards. Sony will be getting a bill.
That's just the very beginning - hook up an air filtration system so humans can briefly enter the containment. Then try to hook up a water level gauge for the reactor pressure vessel, so they can actually tell how much of the core is uncovered. Then they can think about what to do next.
All this work is taking place in partially collapsed buildings where explosions have destroyed the structure. Ordinarily, one would bring in big cranes with grabs and start removing debris. But they can't do that.
The situation remains dangerous as long as there are still many red blocks on the JAIF's status chart. Note that reactors 1,2, and 3 still have not reached cold shutdown, where the reactor core is below the boiling point of water, all steam has condensed to water, and pressure in the reactor vessel is down to one atmosphere. All the ad-hoc cooling measures aren't enough to get the core temperature down. Normal time to cold shutdown for a GE Mark I reactor is about a day. Even at Three Mile Island, it took only about two days to reach cold shutdown.
It's likely that Sony went off-line not because they wanted to, but because VISA International and/or MasterCard Worldwide ordered them to. See my post on "What To Do if Compromised". The contract that merchants must sign to accept credit cards gives the credit card companies the right to send in a VISA fraud team, a Cardholder Information Security Team, and a computer forensics team. VISA can insist that compromised systems containing credit card data be taken off line until examined. For a big breach, VISA probably invoked their right to do all that.
The process is expensive for the merchant who doesn't have the VISA-required security measures in place. They get hit with fines from VISA, the cost of the forensics work, and chargebacks from compromised credit cards. "If a Visa member fails to immediately notify Visa Inc. Fraud Control of the suspected or confirmed loss or theft of any Visa transaction information, the member will be subject to a penalty of $100,000 per incident.
Members are subject to fines, up to $500,000 per incident, for any merchant or service provider that is compromised and not compliant at the time of the incident." Worse, from a business perspective, they can't accept credit cards again until VISA's team says they're secure.
Then comes the "Account Data Compromise Recovery phase. For the next 13 months, the merchant gets hit with charges related to compromised credit cards.
A merchant-side compromise of credit card data means the merchant gets stuck with all the costs of the breach.
First, after more than half a century of work, we don't have a controlled fusion technology that generates more power than goes in. Not even close.
Second, if we did, it would probably be a deuterium-tritium reaction, which can be started at much lower energy levels. That's a good way to generate energy if it can be done. It does generate neutrons, though, which means that the containment tends to become radioactive over time. This probably means having some mildly radioactive metal to deal with. That's not a big problem.
D-T fusion also produces tritium, which is valuable,and in 12 years or so decays into... helium-3.
So if we ever get fusion going, we'll probably have excess helium-3. Helium-3 fusion is cleaner, in that the outputs are helium and protons - no annoying neutrons. If we ever get fusion working, we'll probably see D-T fusion for fixed plants, and He3 fusion for spacecraft, with the He3 coming from the D-T plants.
Read "What To Do if Compromised", the official instructions for merchants who accept VISA cards. Sony is clearly doing some of the things VISA requires: "Do not access or alter compromised systems, i.e. don't log on at all to the compromised systems.... Do not turn systems off. Isolate compromised systems from the network..." Then they have to call the VISA Incident Response Manager, and the full list of compromised cards has to go to VISA, which parcels it out to the issuing banks for card cancellations and reissues.
VISA has the contractual right to send in a forensics team. VISA will assess fines up to $500,000 if VISA's security requirements haven't been met. If compromised data includes PIN numbers for debit cards, or CVV2 data for credit cards, which merchants aren't supposed to store at all, VISA sends in a Qualified Security Assessor. They check that the systems are no longer storing that data, and that all historical data of that type has been erased, before they go back on line.
Now it's clear why Sony is off line. Their actions look like what happens when a major debit card breach occurs and VISA sends in the forensics and security teams.
So there's your answer when management doesn't want to have proper security on credit card data. VISA can and will shut temporarily down your ability to accept payments. You'll have law enforcement, forensic auditors, and security experts questioning your management. Your company may have to pay sizable fines to VISA. Your CEO may have to explain the screwup to reporters.
And that's the good case. The bad case is when VISA decides you don't get to accept credit or debit cards any more, permanently. This happens routinely to screwed-up small businesses.
RCA developed this for NBC's election returns. Election nights used to have huge rooms of electromechanical display boards. NBC wanted something better. So they had RCA develop a character generator, to be used in conjunction with election predictions made on RCA computers. "Makes your television set a part of the computer".
Previously, there had been stroke character displays for vector CRTs. SAGE used those. There was the Charactron tube, where a focused electron beam was steered through a stencil of letters, then aimed at the screen. There was something called the Monoscope, which was a TV-camera like tube with a permanently fixed stencil as the image. There were flying-spot scanners, where you put a slide in front of a CRT, and a phototube read the changing light, generating a video signal. All these devices were either limited or expensive. (A 21-inch Charactron tube was six feet long.) Generating character video in real time, entirely electronically, was a big deal at the time.
(I've been trying to find video on line of the NBC election coverage with this.)
These "Top N" lists, one ad-laden page per item, are mostly ad and link farms. If you have to mention them in a Slashdot article, link to the print page. If there's no page, don't link at all.
DESIGNERWARE
Fictitious Names - Domestic
Entity Number: 2808492
Status: Active
Entity Creation Date: 3/30/1998
State of Business.: PA
Principal Place of Business: 108 HUTCHINSON
NORTH EAST (a real place, a borough of Erie County 5 miles northeast of the city of Erie) PA 16428-1710
Owners Name: TIMOTHY S KELLY
Google Maps shows that as a 2-story frame house in reasonably good condition with two cars in the driveway..
Dun and Bradstreet reports
DESIGNERWARE
Single Location: 108 HUTCHINSON DR, NORTH EAST, PA
Address 108 | HUTCHINSON | DR Acreage 0.2870
Topo LEVEL Utility ALL PUBLIC
Zoning SINGLE FAMILY RESIDENTIAL
Land Value / Taxable 18,000 / 18,000.00
Building Value / Taxable 120,560 / 120,560.00
Total Value / Taxable 138,560 / 138,560.00
Clean & Green: Inactive
Homestead Status: Active
Style CONVENTIONAL
Basement FULL
Year Built 1973
Exterior Wall ALUMINUM/VINYL
Total Living Area 3156
Full Baths 2, Half Baths 1
Heating GAS, CENTRAL, FORCED AIR
Stories 2.0,
Total Bedrooms 3,
Total Family Rooms 0,
Total Rooms 7,
Fireplaces 1
REINFORCED CONCRETE POOL 1992
FRAME UTILITY SHED 1990
Sales History: 1/26/1990
Osama Bin Laden's organization needed a LOT of money to keep going.
Not really. The 9/11 attack only cost about $200,000 to execute. Al-Queda was never that big. In recent years it's been more of a loose coordinating group for various militant factions. In its best years, Al-Queda raised maybe $30 million. That decreased as the US found ways to cut off its funding sources.
Game development and movie development are different skills, one is long duration interactive entertainment and the other is short duration passive entertainment.
True. However, the game-to-movie direction today has more promise than the movie-to-game direction. Games made from movie franchises tend to be track rides - you will follow the plot. On the other hand, a free-play game provides known characters and settings on which a screenwriter can build a plot - even when the game barely has one. ("Prince of Persia" comes to mind.)
The details will be interesting. He was reportedly killed in a mansion near Islamabad, Pakistan. That's the capital city. He hasn't been hiding out in the boonies.
Slashdot Mirror
A guy at my university put together a (fairly basic) interactive website with a slightly inventive concept a year or so ago - it got some good publicity, then was taken down by the university, causing a controversy that netted him much, much more publicity.
Oh, FitFinder, done by someone at University College, London. Now if that had happened at Stanford, the student would have been hooked up with a venture capitalist and encouraged.
Stanford is really a venture capital and real estate firm which runs a university as a sideline. In 1992, Stanford University spun off the management of its endowment to the Stanford Management Company. They set up shop at 2770 Sand Hill Road, which is where almost all the Silicon Valley venture capitalists have their headquarters. Within a few years, Stanford was investing in venture capital funds, executives were moving between the academic business unit and the financial unit, and Stanford was turning into a major player in the VC industry.
Stanford actively helps to create startups and takes equity stakes in them. Stanford owns part of Cisco, part of Yahoo, part of Google, etc. They're not just a passive investor, like most universities.
Did you mean to write "at compile-time"?
Yes.
core language doesn't bother with safety, which makes it fast.
That's a popular misconception of C and C++ programmers. There are modern hard-compiled languages with memory safety. Modula 3 (which, sadly, died with DEC), Erlang (popular in telephony, where speed really matters), and even Delphi (which sank with Borland) had decent solutions to the safety problem without speed penalties. Go is the coming safe language that goes fast.
(If you're not familiar with the technical issues, the basic problem with C is that you have to lie to the language about arrays. The "pointer = array" concept means that you tell the compiler you're passing an object by reference when you're in fact passing an array by reference. You can't even express in the language that you're passing an array. So the compiler can't tell what you're doing and check it. This is the underlying language flaw which allows buffer overflows. Microsoft kludged up something called "Standard Annotation Language" to deal with this lack of expressive power, developed some tools that use it, and they find it useful. But as a language bolt-on, it's limited.)
Pushing the safety problem up to a macro level (where templates live) just pastes wallpaper over the mold at the bottom. The mold always seeps through, because too many things still require raw pointers. Every day, millions of program crashes occur because of this.
Dear Larry, Sergey, Eric, Mark, Jerry, and friends:
If the brightest idea all your super-smart people can come up with is to interpose yourselves into every interaction a human being is involved in on the internet, then we don't need your kind of economic engine.
The stock market agrees. Google's stock peaked in late 2007. It's now about 25% below the peak. It's not the recession; GOOG has underperformed the DJIA and the NASDAQ since 2007. Google is frantically trying to diversify into something else that makes money. But it's not working. Revenue is still around 97% ads. Revenue is growing, but expenses on all those money losing "products" are growing faster. YouTube is profitable, but only because it's been turned into an ad farm.
Thus the importance of "tracking" to Google. It's their edge in the ad business. If they lose the privilege of tracking their users and exploiting that information for advertising purposes, their margins on advertising will go down. And that's all that brings in money.
The usual slimeballs are behind this:
If all those organizations went bust, the world would be a better place. Applying some pain to all of them is a good first step.
""+" doesn't append _two numbers_, but it can append _number to string_ In every other language I've seen, the CORRECTly expected result is 11 or error. Perl, C++, etc. The point is that you can never trust your input if you are expecting numeric.
It's also wrong in Python, in an even worse way. The problem began with using "+" for concatenation. Concatenation works on sequences, so [1,2] + [3,4] in Python is [1,2,3,4], which is not what one might expect. Worse, Python has both sequences and numeric arrays (as part of the standard NumPy math package), and numeric arrays have different semantics. Adding numeric arrays with "+" has numerical semantics - you get a vector addition. Still worse, mixed mode addition between sequences and numeric arrays is allowed. (Discovering the semantics of that is left to the reader.)
Then this was generalized to multiplication. In Python, "[1,2] * 2" is [1,2,1,2]. Ulp.
This is a non-trivial design error in Python. Python functions are essentially generic, This allows some functions designed for scalars to generalize to complex numbers and vectors. It's thus quite reasonable for someone to use either a list of numbers or a numeric array as an argument to the same function. That produces unexpected results, often without raising an error exception.
This is one of the standard language designer errors. The other classic is not putting in a "bool" type at the beginning. Retrofitting one later never quite works right, because mixed-mode integer and bool semantics get ugly. C and Python both retrofitted bool types, and the dents still show. Mathematically, for Booleans, "+" should be OR, and "*" should be AND. If you don't like that, they should be errors. In Python, "True + True" is 2.
This was more significant in the pre-USB 2.0 era. It's now possible to get USB interfaces to almost anything. It used to be that your choices were a serial port, a parallel port, a data acquisition board, or custom hardware. Now there's usually some inexpensive USB device that will do the job.
It's hard to find low-cost devices which provide 50MHz digital in/out ports. There are lots of USB to digital I/O interface devices, but only a few can reach even 40MHz. If you don't need that much speed, though, a USB device will be simpler to deal with. And you'll be able to do something else on the main CPU while driving the I/O device.
The C++ standards committee has been lost in template la-la land for the last decade. They've focused on features understood by few and used correctly in production code by fewer. Since the discovery that the C++ template system could be abused as a term-rewriting system to perform arbitrary computations at run-time, that concept has received far too much attention. It's an ugly way to program, but it's "l33t". On the other hand, they've been unable to fix any of the fundamental safety problems in the language. C++ is unique among mainstream languages in providing hiding ("abstraction") without memory safety. (C has neither, Simula, Pascal, Ada, Java, Delphi, Erlang, Haskell, Go, and all the "scripting languages" have both.) So there's an example of a committee screwing up.
On the Python side, we have von Rossum. The problem there is that he likes features that are easy to implement in his CPython implementation, which is a naive interpreter, even if they inhibit most attempts at optimization. As a result, Python isn't much faster than it was a decade ago, and is still about 60x slower than C. Attempts to speed it up have either failed or resulted in insanely complex, yet still sluggish, implementations. So that's the "guru" approach.
You have to use your secret military advantage to get value from it. The time to do that is when taking out the target is worth more than keeping the secret.
This op was worth it.
"Those five thousand ships, you say the Allies can't possibly have, they've got them! " - Maj. Werner Pluskat, defensive bunker, Normandy coast, June 6, 1944.
There are many little ARM boards, some of which are priced as low as $39 in quantity 1. These are useful for applications where the ATMega in an Arduno is too limiting.
The choice of peripherals these guys made is unusual. With a USB port and an HDMI port, you can build a game machine, which is probably what they had in mind. Most such boards are more suited to embedded applications, and have I/O - digital TTL ports, Ethernet, LCD drive, etc.
A problem with these minimal machines is deciding what to put on them. The lowest-price devices tend to have too little of some resource and too much of something you don't need. This leads to a proliferation of little embedded boards with slightly different options, which runs the cost back up.
For hobbyists, the Leaflands Maple may be interesting. It's an ARM board in the Arduno form factor. It's compatible with Arduno daughter boards ("shields"), and has some commonality with the Arduno development environment. Not enough memory to run Linux, though.
The $25 price is a vaporware price - they're not actually shipping. NXP is shipping LPCExpresso for "under $30", and that includes the entire tool chain (Eclipse, GCC, JTAG debugger, etc.)
Humans are not entering the "containment". They are entering the reactor building.
That has to be right. But what's still airtight enough to be entered through an airlock? Here's what Unit 1 looks like.
Never mind the fact that not a single cause of fraud has been associated with the intrusion...
We don't know that. In fact, Sony wouldn't know that unless VISA International tells them.
The fraud may have taken place before the Sony break-in was discovered. It takes a billing cycle or two before phony charges become clear, as customers complain. Somewhere in VISA International, claims from consumers to their banks about false charges are being correlated against the list of compromised cards. Sony will be getting a bill.
That's just the very beginning - hook up an air filtration system so humans can briefly enter the containment. Then try to hook up a water level gauge for the reactor pressure vessel, so they can actually tell how much of the core is uncovered. Then they can think about what to do next.
All this work is taking place in partially collapsed buildings where explosions have destroyed the structure. Ordinarily, one would bring in big cranes with grabs and start removing debris. But they can't do that.
The situation remains dangerous as long as there are still many red blocks on the JAIF's status chart. Note that reactors 1,2, and 3 still have not reached cold shutdown, where the reactor core is below the boiling point of water, all steam has condensed to water, and pressure in the reactor vessel is down to one atmosphere. All the ad-hoc cooling measures aren't enough to get the core temperature down. Normal time to cold shutdown for a GE Mark I reactor is about a day. Even at Three Mile Island, it took only about two days to reach cold shutdown.
"After many years as a star programmer, I have taken a position which involves maintaining and rebuilding the in-house network of a small company.
Learn how to do it, get it done, then work hard on getting a better job. Being an administrator for a small network is a miserable job.
It's likely that Sony went off-line not because they wanted to, but because VISA International and/or MasterCard Worldwide ordered them to. See my post on "What To Do if Compromised". The contract that merchants must sign to accept credit cards gives the credit card companies the right to send in a VISA fraud team, a Cardholder Information Security Team, and a computer forensics team. VISA can insist that compromised systems containing credit card data be taken off line until examined. For a big breach, VISA probably invoked their right to do all that.
The process is expensive for the merchant who doesn't have the VISA-required security measures in place. They get hit with fines from VISA, the cost of the forensics work, and chargebacks from compromised credit cards. "If a Visa member fails to immediately notify Visa Inc. Fraud Control of the suspected or confirmed loss or theft of any Visa transaction information, the member will be subject to a penalty of $100,000 per incident. Members are subject to fines, up to $500,000 per incident, for any merchant or service provider that is compromised and not compliant at the time of the incident." Worse, from a business perspective, they can't accept credit cards again until VISA's team says they're secure.
Then comes the "Account Data Compromise Recovery phase. For the next 13 months, the merchant gets hit with charges related to compromised credit cards.
A merchant-side compromise of credit card data means the merchant gets stuck with all the costs of the breach.
First, after more than half a century of work, we don't have a controlled fusion technology that generates more power than goes in. Not even close.
Second, if we did, it would probably be a deuterium-tritium reaction, which can be started at much lower energy levels. That's a good way to generate energy if it can be done. It does generate neutrons, though, which means that the containment tends to become radioactive over time. This probably means having some mildly radioactive metal to deal with. That's not a big problem.
D-T fusion also produces tritium, which is valuable,and in 12 years or so decays into ... helium-3.
So if we ever get fusion going, we'll probably have excess helium-3. Helium-3 fusion is cleaner, in that the outputs are helium and protons - no annoying neutrons. If we ever get fusion working, we'll probably see D-T fusion for fixed plants, and He3 fusion for spacecraft, with the He3 coming from the D-T plants.
Read "What To Do if Compromised", the official instructions for merchants who accept VISA cards. Sony is clearly doing some of the things VISA requires: "Do not access or alter compromised systems, i.e. don't log on at all to the compromised systems. ... Do not turn systems off. Isolate compromised systems from the network ..." Then they have to call the VISA Incident Response Manager, and the full list of compromised cards has to go to VISA, which parcels it out to the issuing banks for card cancellations and reissues.
VISA has the contractual right to send in a forensics team. VISA will assess fines up to $500,000 if VISA's security requirements haven't been met. If compromised data includes PIN numbers for debit cards, or CVV2 data for credit cards, which merchants aren't supposed to store at all, VISA sends in a Qualified Security Assessor. They check that the systems are no longer storing that data, and that all historical data of that type has been erased, before they go back on line.
Now it's clear why Sony is off line. Their actions look like what happens when a major debit card breach occurs and VISA sends in the forensics and security teams.
So there's your answer when management doesn't want to have proper security on credit card data. VISA can and will shut temporarily down your ability to accept payments. You'll have law enforcement, forensic auditors, and security experts questioning your management. Your company may have to pay sizable fines to VISA. Your CEO may have to explain the screwup to reporters.
And that's the good case. The bad case is when VISA decides you don't get to accept credit or debit cards any more, permanently. This happens routinely to screwed-up small businesses.
RCA developed this for NBC's election returns. Election nights used to have huge rooms of electromechanical display boards. NBC wanted something better. So they had RCA develop a character generator, to be used in conjunction with election predictions made on RCA computers. "Makes your television set a part of the computer".
Previously, there had been stroke character displays for vector CRTs. SAGE used those. There was the Charactron tube, where a focused electron beam was steered through a stencil of letters, then aimed at the screen. There was something called the Monoscope, which was a TV-camera like tube with a permanently fixed stencil as the image. There were flying-spot scanners, where you put a slide in front of a CRT, and a phototube read the changing light, generating a video signal. All these devices were either limited or expensive. (A 21-inch Charactron tube was six feet long.) Generating character video in real time, entirely electronically, was a big deal at the time.
(I've been trying to find video on line of the NBC election coverage with this.)
Link to single-page printable version without ads.
These "Top N" lists, one ad-laden page per item, are mostly ad and link farms. If you have to mention them in a Slashdot article, link to the print page. If there's no page, don't link at all.
State of Pennsylvania Business Search:
Google Maps shows that as a 2-story frame house in reasonably good condition with two cars in the driveway..
Dun and Bradstreet reports
You can buy a D&B credit report on them.
Checking Erie County property records:
Osama Bin Laden's organization needed a LOT of money to keep going.
Not really. The 9/11 attack only cost about $200,000 to execute. Al-Queda was never that big. In recent years it's been more of a loose coordinating group for various militant factions. In its best years, Al-Queda raised maybe $30 million. That decreased as the US found ways to cut off its funding sources.
With Sony in so much trouble, with a loss of credibility, and with the Japanese semiconductor industry somewhat disrupted,will the PS4 be cancelled?
Game development and movie development are different skills, one is long duration interactive entertainment and the other is short duration passive entertainment.
True. However, the game-to-movie direction today has more promise than the movie-to-game direction. Games made from movie franchises tend to be track rides - you will follow the plot. On the other hand, a free-play game provides known characters and settings on which a screenwriter can build a plot - even when the game barely has one. ("Prince of Persia" comes to mind.)
I'd be interested to hear why the Mozilla developers don't use an existing compiler framework like LLVM...
LLVM is intended for more static languages than Javascript. The Unladen Swallow project tried to use it for Python, and that was a failure..
The details will be interesting. He was reportedly killed in a mansion near Islamabad, Pakistan. That's the capital city. He hasn't been hiding out in the boonies.
The entire first page is someone blithering about themself. There may be some useful information on later pages.