Maybe they're not going to go for a full sized ribbon and instead will opt for a more compact version thats appropriate for a web browser. Maybe a string or yarn. Perhaps a thread.
It was my understanding that Office went to the ribbon because there were new features that didn't naturally fit into the menu bars and the menu bar interface was getting too confusing because there were so many features. With several browsers having simplified their UI, almost to a fault I think, I don't see how a web-browser would need to make use of a ribbon. I am interested to see what they come up with though since I don't think I've seen a ribbon interface used on something that doesn't have a ton of features. I've never been a fan of it in the Office environment but, who knows, maybe the ribbon shines when there aren't a million options and features to cram into it.
If it works, great. If not, there are other browsers.
As one of the 3 people that actually enjoyed playing Spore, I'm glad that they fixed the issue where you couldn't completely defeat the grox without cheating. I'll probably get a legitimate copy of the game now.
Civil court: Innocent as long as she and her pro bono lawyer can keep the team of lawyers with plenty of resources and "expert witnesses" from convincing a judge that she's probably guilty of copying a file or two.
I wish her the best of luck and hope the good people with experience battling the RIAA in court come to her aide so she can concentrate on her health.
Does the reward stipulate where they must be captured and convicted? If the guy is out of the country its pretty unlikely that he'll be captured and convicted in the United States. If he's in one of the many places where the local government can't or doesn't care enough to, arrest and put him on trial, the reward is absolutely useless.
This isn't like calling the tip line where you give a tip on a local drug dealer the cops can capture and convict in a matter of months. This is probably an international extortion case that will almost definitely not end in "capture and conviction." Its not like a trial and conviction changes the fact that the data was stolen and was probably sold off or dumped the second the company put a reward on the guys head.
Its a PR stunt. The "capture and conviction" stipulation on this type of case means its a really safe bet they won't have to pay out. Its just a clever way of notifying everyone that they lost a bunch of data and have no idea how much was taken.
Q. How can I contact you if the phone number on page 28 of my manual only has the area code and 6 numbers?
Re:Sorry, Loebner Has Done Nothing for AI
on
Loebner Talks AI
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I always imagine the first, and last, computer that will pass the Turing Test will be the one explaining to us that it has taken over the world because we aren't intelligent enough to run it ourselves.:P It will end the conversation with "You really didn't see this coming? What a bunch of idiots."
When I first read this I wasn't impressed that he pixelated a few pictures into lego pieces. Its obviously not that hard because the story hasn't been up long and 2 or 3 people who have ever done any pixelating or lego stuff have posted their projects in the comments.
Then I looked up how much lego pieces cost. 25,000 1x1 plates would cost around $1,750-$2,500. I'm curious how much his cost reduction the algorithm actually does. If it just searches and replaces rows of horizontal plates with 1x2, 1x3, etc plates and 3 vertical plates with a block, its pretty cool but still not THAT impressive. If it balances image quality with manufacturing costs, I'm really impressed. I'm hoping the 10hr computing time indicates it does that latter.
If police officials there aren't above killing and destroying a body of some woman, what makes him think there aren't potentially serious repercussions for being outspoken in criticizing them. If the life of a news story over there is similar to what it is here, no one will even remember who he is in two weeks and for the next 2 years or so there is one less person making noise about a corrupt govt. An anonymous critic is generally better than a silenced one.
My preference for a generally older group of people to play with has very little to do with the maturity or skill level of the younger players. Its like if you're playing basketball or hanging out at a bar with a bunch of adult friends, you don't have to be overly careful about what you say and can just relax and play, or get drunk, or whatever. Then someone brings their 10 year old out and it would be irresponsible as an adult not to censor yourself a bit regardless of the maturity level of the young person.
So I prefer my gaming to lack 10 year olds so I don't have to worry that they're hearing something inappropriate from me or my friends when we're hanging out and killing stuff. Since p2p tends to result in a group of people old enough to pay for their own account, its a little safer.
The people with money will pay for the extras and the people without money will play because its free (not really free just being paid for by people willing to do so). All the free players stay because its free fun and the pay players stay because there is always something interesting going on when the server is full. Cash shops are usually addictive as hell too. I've had to set some pretty strict rules on myself about using them or else I'll go nuts and spend spend spend.
The International (U.S) Ragnarok Online just opened a free server with a few gameplay tweaks to make it harder and the population is already consistently higher than the two smaller premium servers. The Korean RO opened a free server a while back and its population is substantially larger than all the pay servers combined and I expect it will be that way in IRO too. In fact a lot of people from premium servers are probably going to want to transfer their chars to the free server since the guild wars are probably going to be much better with such a huge server population.
My biggest problem with free to play servers is the fact that the population is a lot younger and not as english speaking as pay to play games/servers. I like having a reasonable expectation that I can communicate with anyone I come across in the game. I also like not having to assume everyone is 12. I'm a young adult with some disposable income and I want to play my video games with people like me. A monthly fee does an ok job at insuring I get what I want.
I very much agree that hacking those systems and getting the data is pretty useless for things like identity theft or credit fraud (unless you can get it all without the breach being noticed) when there are ways of getting better information with significantly less risk. That's is not to say that the data isn't useful if put into the right hands. Two quick examples:
1. A list of people, addresses, phone numbers, last exam dates, and current conditions would be extremely useful in some directed marketing campaigns. I worked for an optometrist and know a lot of people don't make an appointment for their yearly eye exam until they receive a reminder card. A card from another, conveniently located, office near the year mark could easily get them to make an appointment at the new place. Adding purchase histories to that list would make it direct marketing gold.
2. The cost associated with having a large data breach is pretty significant, especially for a small business. Notifying everyone, offering the credit counseling even when hardly anyone uses it, and the loss of patients could easily bankrupt a small practice. If it hit the news, which loves those OMG POSSIBLE IDENTITY THEFT ALERT stories, a small business may have to close up shop. A hacker could hold the data hostage and try blackmail. Risky but not as risky as a good portion of crimes people commit every day.
Both types of breach wouldn't be a big deal in a large medical institution since they have the resources to weather the backlash, but small businesses don't usually have that luxury. The chance of someone trying to pull off either of these examples (or both) is extremely rare but the potential costs are astronomical. Securing the wireless and taking some precautions to minimize people having physical access to terminals in a small practice setting costs almost nothing.
I don't think I've ever worked with a system that couldn't be breached if someone wanted to bad enough and IT professionals in charge of them are likely to know exactly how to do it. There's a big difference in a system that could possibly be breached by criminals with intimate knowledge of it and a system that is realistically at significant risk. Asking paranoid IT pros if their systems are vulnerable is likely not a great indicator of the likelihood of them being breached. Of course, asking overconfident ones is probably a worse indicator.
I will say that some medical records are probably the easiest things in the world to get a hold of. Small private practices generally don't have the knowledge or resource to properly secure their data. A lot of them leave patients in exam rooms alone with a computer, often connected to the internet, for extended periods of time. Not necessarily bad if decent security practices are in place but again, small practices generally don't have the knowledge to have them or just don't feel the need to enforce them.
I know a guy who did some IT work for several small practices and he still contends that MAC Authentication is about as good as security gets for wireless networks and his clients have all the faith in the world in his judgment. Until those networks get breached and someone leaves enough evidence behind to prove him wrong, its likely those networks will be open to the world.
I went to the www.intelcenter.com and found that you can buy dvd's like Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) Videos Vol. 1 DVD:
Our Blessed Jihad in Yunan and al-Qaeda Videos Vol. 135 DVD:
Holocaust of the Americans in the Land of Khorasan, The Islamic Emirate: Shelling of the Crusaders' and Apostates' Base in Paktika for the low low price of $40.
Whether they provide a real service to govt agencies or not, I find peddling terrorist propaganda under the guise of tracking terrorists online as a service to be quite distasteful. If they are doing as much business for govt agencies as the article suggests at the prices in their catalog, do you really think they'd resort to selling what really amounts to $40 fansubs of terrorist group videos? Translation services for news and govt agencies I could understand, but what they're doing is useless and distasteful.
By the way, they have a special offer going on. " Buy any 3 DVDs, Get 1 DVD Free"
"It requires entering your full name, address, and date of birth, and then proceeds to submit it via an unencrypted HTTP POST"
If I wanted a list of names, birth dates and addresses to use for nefarious purposes I don't need to steal yours from some dinky website or sniff packets. I'd just take one of the plentiful lists of birth records on the internet like this one then cross reference it with property tax records of the area which are more plentiful than the birth records and it'll give probable name, dob, and address combinations. A good portion of probable matches can be confirmed through freely available court records. All of that data is fairly trivial to collect in bulk (i used to collect databases, was a pretty fun hobby actually), is perfectly legal and will provide a much better profile of matches than just name/dob/addr combinations stolen from a website or data stream.
Being that anal about your name, birth date and address is actually quite silly. Theres so much low hanging fruit as far as collecting that type of data is concerned (and you're probably already included in it) that all you really did by not continuing with that form was taking yourself out of the running for a Wii.
The best thing you can really do is just keep close tabs on your credit report and get signed up for all the fraud alerts or freezes they offer. Thats the best place to prevent and quickly repair most identity theft. Stop being so anal about info thats almost guaranteed to be out there already, set up your defenses where they're most effective and go get your Wii.
I misread and got excited because I thought the upcoming MMO was called "The Secret World: Rock, Paper, Shotgun." I have no idea what a game named that would be like but I'd probably pay money to find out.
I used to work (3 years ago) at a background checking company that would pull/harvest databases off the internet if the county or state wouldn't sell it to us in bulk. You'd be suprised how many county websites have stuff like this.
There is one county in Florida that will return more results by walking thru their ID numbers than by searching for everyone in thier site. That means people who for whatever reason aren't supposed to show up on the website get harvested by companies like the one I worked at.
A county in Texas tried to stop the harvesting by making people sign in and limiting searches but managed to introduce a sql injection hole that lets you do whatever you'd like to the Users tables. I didn't try messing w/ the offenders tables but wouldn't be suprised if it was possible.
These are just two examples that I recalls. There were quite a few more.
from putting every aspect of our lives to an index. We won't be able to get good service at a restaurant because our ACTT (Average Cost to Tip) Index is too low and the waitress is busy working the patrons with above average scores. Frugal shoppers will be stuck in long lines in the grocery store because the index that keeps track of how many high markup, name brand products we buy won't qualify us for the express lanes for prefered customers. Our MedFICO score will be shot because the new wave of Medical History Theft screwed us up before privacy and consumer laws could catch up to the problems and we'll have to goto Mexico for our routine exams.
Unfortunately the people making these indexes never have to tell single mothers with starving children that they can't use their services. They give that job to the other single mothers with starving children that they've hired minimum wage to work the reception desk. If they did, they might realize that people are actually more than the sum of their indexes.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe they're not going to go for a full sized ribbon and instead will opt for a more compact version thats appropriate for a web browser. Maybe a string or yarn. Perhaps a thread.
It was my understanding that Office went to the ribbon because there were new features that didn't naturally fit into the menu bars and the menu bar interface was getting too confusing because there were so many features. With several browsers having simplified their UI, almost to a fault I think, I don't see how a web-browser would need to make use of a ribbon. I am interested to see what they come up with though since I don't think I've seen a ribbon interface used on something that doesn't have a ton of features. I've never been a fan of it in the Office environment but, who knows, maybe the ribbon shines when there aren't a million options and features to cram into it.
If it works, great. If not, there are other browsers.
As one of the 3 people that actually enjoyed playing Spore, I'm glad that they fixed the issue where you couldn't completely defeat the grox without cheating. I'll probably get a legitimate copy of the game now.
Civil court: Innocent as long as she and her pro bono lawyer can keep the team of lawyers with plenty of resources and "expert witnesses" from convincing a judge that she's probably guilty of copying a file or two.
I wish her the best of luck and hope the good people with experience battling the RIAA in court come to her aide so she can concentrate on her health.
Does the reward stipulate where they must be captured and convicted? If the guy is out of the country its pretty unlikely that he'll be captured and convicted in the United States. If he's in one of the many places where the local government can't or doesn't care enough to, arrest and put him on trial, the reward is absolutely useless.
This isn't like calling the tip line where you give a tip on a local drug dealer the cops can capture and convict in a matter of months. This is probably an international extortion case that will almost definitely not end in "capture and conviction." Its not like a trial and conviction changes the fact that the data was stolen and was probably sold off or dumped the second the company put a reward on the guys head.
Its a PR stunt. The "capture and conviction" stipulation on this type of case means its a really safe bet they won't have to pay out. Its just a clever way of notifying everyone that they lost a bunch of data and have no idea how much was taken.
Q.
How can I contact you if the phone number on page 28 of my manual only has the area code and 6 numbers?
I always imagine the first, and last, computer that will pass the Turing Test will be the one explaining to us that it has taken over the world because we aren't intelligent enough to run it ourselves. :P It will end the conversation with "You really didn't see this coming? What a bunch of idiots."
When I first read this I wasn't impressed that he pixelated a few pictures into lego pieces. Its obviously not that hard because the story hasn't been up long and 2 or 3 people who have ever done any pixelating or lego stuff have posted their projects in the comments.
Then I looked up how much lego pieces cost. 25,000 1x1 plates would cost around $1,750-$2,500. I'm curious how much his cost reduction the algorithm actually does. If it just searches and replaces rows of horizontal plates with 1x2, 1x3, etc plates and 3 vertical plates with a block, its pretty cool but still not THAT impressive. If it balances image quality with manufacturing costs, I'm really impressed. I'm hoping the 10hr computing time indicates it does that latter.
If police officials there aren't above killing and destroying a body of some woman, what makes him think there aren't potentially serious repercussions for being outspoken in criticizing them. If the life of a news story over there is similar to what it is here, no one will even remember who he is in two weeks and for the next 2 years or so there is one less person making noise about a corrupt govt. An anonymous critic is generally better than a silenced one.
My preference for a generally older group of people to play with has very little to do with the maturity or skill level of the younger players. Its like if you're playing basketball or hanging out at a bar with a bunch of adult friends, you don't have to be overly careful about what you say and can just relax and play, or get drunk, or whatever. Then someone brings their 10 year old out and it would be irresponsible as an adult not to censor yourself a bit regardless of the maturity level of the young person.
So I prefer my gaming to lack 10 year olds so I don't have to worry that they're hearing something inappropriate from me or my friends when we're hanging out and killing stuff. Since p2p tends to result in a group of people old enough to pay for their own account, its a little safer.
The people with money will pay for the extras and the people without money will play because its free (not really free just being paid for by people willing to do so). All the free players stay because its free fun and the pay players stay because there is always something interesting going on when the server is full. Cash shops are usually addictive as hell too. I've had to set some pretty strict rules on myself about using them or else I'll go nuts and spend spend spend.
The International (U.S) Ragnarok Online just opened a free server with a few gameplay tweaks to make it harder and the population is already consistently higher than the two smaller premium servers. The Korean RO opened a free server a while back and its population is substantially larger than all the pay servers combined and I expect it will be that way in IRO too. In fact a lot of people from premium servers are probably going to want to transfer their chars to the free server since the guild wars are probably going to be much better with such a huge server population.
My biggest problem with free to play servers is the fact that the population is a lot younger and not as english speaking as pay to play games/servers. I like having a reasonable expectation that I can communicate with anyone I come across in the game. I also like not having to assume everyone is 12. I'm a young adult with some disposable income and I want to play my video games with people like me. A monthly fee does an ok job at insuring I get what I want.
I very much agree that hacking those systems and getting the data is pretty useless for things like identity theft or credit fraud (unless you can get it all without the breach being noticed) when there are ways of getting better information with significantly less risk. That's is not to say that the data isn't useful if put into the right hands. Two quick examples:
1. A list of people, addresses, phone numbers, last exam dates, and current conditions would be extremely useful in some directed marketing campaigns. I worked for an optometrist and know a lot of people don't make an appointment for their yearly eye exam until they receive a reminder card. A card from another, conveniently located, office near the year mark could easily get them to make an appointment at the new place. Adding purchase histories to that list would make it direct marketing gold.
2. The cost associated with having a large data breach is pretty significant, especially for a small business. Notifying everyone, offering the credit counseling even when hardly anyone uses it, and the loss of patients could easily bankrupt a small practice. If it hit the news, which loves those OMG POSSIBLE IDENTITY THEFT ALERT stories, a small business may have to close up shop. A hacker could hold the data hostage and try blackmail. Risky but not as risky as a good portion of crimes people commit every day.
Both types of breach wouldn't be a big deal in a large medical institution since they have the resources to weather the backlash, but small businesses don't usually have that luxury. The chance of someone trying to pull off either of these examples (or both) is extremely rare but the potential costs are astronomical. Securing the wireless and taking some precautions to minimize people having physical access to terminals in a small practice setting costs almost nothing.
I don't think I've ever worked with a system that couldn't be breached if someone wanted to bad enough and IT professionals in charge of them are likely to know exactly how to do it. There's a big difference in a system that could possibly be breached by criminals with intimate knowledge of it and a system that is realistically at significant risk. Asking paranoid IT pros if their systems are vulnerable is likely not a great indicator of the likelihood of them being breached. Of course, asking overconfident ones is probably a worse indicator.
I will say that some medical records are probably the easiest things in the world to get a hold of. Small private practices generally don't have the knowledge or resource to properly secure their data. A lot of them leave patients in exam rooms alone with a computer, often connected to the internet, for extended periods of time. Not necessarily bad if decent security practices are in place but again, small practices generally don't have the knowledge to have them or just don't feel the need to enforce them.
I know a guy who did some IT work for several small practices and he still contends that MAC Authentication is about as good as security gets for wireless networks and his clients have all the faith in the world in his judgment. Until those networks get breached and someone leaves enough evidence behind to prove him wrong, its likely those networks will be open to the world.
I went to the www.intelcenter.com and found that you can buy dvd's like Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) Videos Vol. 1 DVD: Our Blessed Jihad in Yunan and al-Qaeda Videos Vol. 135 DVD: Holocaust of the Americans in the Land of Khorasan, The Islamic Emirate: Shelling of the Crusaders' and Apostates' Base in Paktika for the low low price of $40.
Whether they provide a real service to govt agencies or not, I find peddling terrorist propaganda under the guise of tracking terrorists online as a service to be quite distasteful. If they are doing as much business for govt agencies as the article suggests at the prices in their catalog, do you really think they'd resort to selling what really amounts to $40 fansubs of terrorist group videos? Translation services for news and govt agencies I could understand, but what they're doing is useless and distasteful.
By the way, they have a special offer going on. " Buy any 3 DVDs, Get 1 DVD Free"
"It requires entering your full name, address, and date of birth, and then proceeds to submit it via an unencrypted HTTP POST"
If I wanted a list of names, birth dates and addresses to use for nefarious purposes I don't need to steal yours from some dinky website or sniff packets. I'd just take one of the plentiful lists of birth records on the internet like this one then cross reference it with property tax records of the area which are more plentiful than the birth records and it'll give probable name, dob, and address combinations. A good portion of probable matches can be confirmed through freely available court records. All of that data is fairly trivial to collect in bulk (i used to collect databases, was a pretty fun hobby actually), is perfectly legal and will provide a much better profile of matches than just name/dob/addr combinations stolen from a website or data stream.
Being that anal about your name, birth date and address is actually quite silly. Theres so much low hanging fruit as far as collecting that type of data is concerned (and you're probably already included in it) that all you really did by not continuing with that form was taking yourself out of the running for a Wii.
The best thing you can really do is just keep close tabs on your credit report and get signed up for all the fraud alerts or freezes they offer. Thats the best place to prevent and quickly repair most identity theft. Stop being so anal about info thats almost guaranteed to be out there already, set up your defenses where they're most effective and go get your Wii.
I misread and got excited because I thought the upcoming MMO was called "The Secret World: Rock, Paper, Shotgun." I have no idea what a game named that would be like but I'd probably pay money to find out.
I used to work (3 years ago) at a background checking company that would pull/harvest databases off the internet if the county or state wouldn't sell it to us in bulk. You'd be suprised how many county websites have stuff like this.
There is one county in Florida that will return more results by walking thru their ID numbers than by searching for everyone in thier site. That means people who for whatever reason aren't supposed to show up on the website get harvested by companies like the one I worked at.
A county in Texas tried to stop the harvesting by making people sign in and limiting searches but managed to introduce a sql injection hole that lets you do whatever you'd like to the Users tables. I didn't try messing w/ the offenders tables but wouldn't be suprised if it was possible.
These are just two examples that I recalls. There were quite a few more.
I'd be willing to concede your rock hit the planet if you'll agree that the Zombie Jew self-dad might have thrown it.
"I reject your reality and substitute my own!"
from putting every aspect of our lives to an index. We won't be able to get good service at a restaurant because our ACTT (Average Cost to Tip) Index is too low and the waitress is busy working the patrons with above average scores. Frugal shoppers will be stuck in long lines in the grocery store because the index that keeps track of how many high markup, name brand products we buy won't qualify us for the express lanes for prefered customers. Our MedFICO score will be shot because the new wave of Medical History Theft screwed us up before privacy and consumer laws could catch up to the problems and we'll have to goto Mexico for our routine exams.
Unfortunately the people making these indexes never have to tell single mothers with starving children that they can't use their services. They give that job to the other single mothers with starving children that they've hired minimum wage to work the reception desk. If they did, they might realize that people are actually more than the sum of their indexes.