Did you see the part of TFA where the user was given no indication that 'motoblur' was active, and the phone was using randomly generated 'motoblur' credentials because it had never even prompted him to create any?
I could understand this if Windows was a free product with an ad-free pro upgrade but for a full product this is inexcusable
Even better, it's a feature that the high-willingness-to-pay corporate market will fucking loath(Oh, sure, we don't mind if our strategy leaks to who-knows-who every time somebody searches for an email...), it's a feature that will just help them look trashy and cheap compared to Apple(who already excels at making their competitors look trashy and cheap), and it is closest to the featureset of a more mature product that Google gives away for free with ads(and Microsoft wants you to pay for).
Should be a big win all around! Then again, though, they've mostly gotten away with it on XBL, so it could be just that bad out there.
Given the rate of success at de-anonymizing all sorts of allegedly-anonymized datasets of any particular interest, it's best to treat 'anonymized' as a mere weasel word, even if it is used in clueless good faith(and it often doesn't even go that far).
I don't know if Fomepizole is superior on some respects to ethanol(lower toxicity, say, allowing you to saturate the patient more heavily); but that's my impression of why it isn't more popular. Now, as any number of contaminated-rotgut-itis demonstrate, just mixing some ethanol with your methanol isn't necessarily good enough to save you; but it apparently can be done correctly.
If I were feeling charitable, I might imagine that he's never used a 'pure' GPS device, only the (sometimes internet connected, sometimes non-IP cellular data) A-GPS gear.
It's possible that Samuelson has spent a little too long living in Bethesda, MD, proud home to a metric fuckton of defense contractors and private sector spook shops...
I feel stupider for having read that...
on
Beware the Internet
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Is the good Mr. Samuelson aware that 'the internet' is not actually a binary thing(except in certain architectural senses)? It's not like somebody in the control room flips a switch and *boom* TCP-rays fan out, brutally penetrating previously secure systems. You. Have. To. Connect. Things. To. The. Internet. To. Make. Them. Vulnerable. Are there plenty of things connected, that really ought not to be, because people are insufferably cheap and lazy? Sure, hard to argue with that. Does it somehow follow that we would be 'better off without the internet?". Only if you live in a curious universe where you have to shut down the entire internet just to get a few dumb fuckers to airgap their retro SCADA system.
(One might also argue that, if the people who are actually victims of internet attacks, the various companies and banks and things he cites, aren't willing to give up the convenience and low cost of the internet in favor of greater security, it is possible that the alarmist bullshit of people who want a wider remit to expand their paranoid security state online is alarmist bullshit... There is an argument to be made that people who haven't yet been attacked are illogically discounting the costs of future attacks in favor of present savings; but people who are being attacked today are weighing the costs and the benefits of being networked today, and generally staying networked. Go figure...)
./ editors have a special liver that can process it.
If memory serves, the trick to avoiding ill effects with methanol is to not process it. Methanol itself isn't that nasty, with initial effects approximately equivalent to the same amount of ethanol(so you can drink yourself to death; but it takes some work); but you metabolize it into delicious formic acid, which proceeds to do you no good at all. If you can avoid metabolizing it, you'll excrete it reasonably quickly without substantial further harm.
Fomepizole is the fancy, expensive, science-tastic alcohol dehydrogenase competitive inhibitor; Ethanol is the more common and well loved one.
The next question, could this be used as a fuel for long term space travel? Or even just harvested?
Fortunately for anybody planning on travelling at nontrivial fractions of c, less fortunately for anybody planning on gathering fuel, there just isn't much 'there' there. Some denser regions; but plenty of space with less than an atom per cubic centimeter.
This finding could led to the development of a new phase in chemistry - very low temperature chemistry
We are led to believe that chemicals get to mix better when temperatures are applied, but from what I read from TFA, that quantum tunneling process, if we can harness it, could save us a lot of energy in the many laboratories / factories all around the world
I suspect that the degree to which heat-pumping to achieve very, very, low temperatures is a pain in the ass(and quite energy intensive) compared to conventional resistive or combustion heating will limit the economy of using it as a replacement for existing high-temperature processes; but there are probably a lot of interesting products that won't form in useful amounts at modest temperature; but won't survive high temperatures. Those could be very promising candidates...
Unless some OEM decides, against all good sense, to either give the corporate market the shaft or to multiply their driver-support headaches by using substantially different hardware, rather than just different plastics kits and other minor differentiation, between 'corporate' and 'home/small business', we'll probably still be seeing Win7 compatible machines for years to come. Unless you are a volume license customer, coming up with a copy of Win7 that passes activation is your problem(so you might want to buy a non-OEM copy, or get some practice at wheedling MS phone support to reactivate you on new motherboards); but hardware shouldn't be a significant issue(outside of specific Wintablets, where 8 may actually be a better choice).
To this day, with something like a year left on the clock, we can still get boring business desktops and laptops with XP support(and not just old stock, though there is plenty of good condition off-lease gear to be had, for crazy cheap, these are fresh-off-the-line new models).
Microsoft has considerable leverage over people who aren't volume customers(a group whose willingness to pay for software MS loves; but which is very inflexible about its upgrade timelines and shitty in-house software), or who don't own 'floating', non-hardware-locked licenses for their OS of choice; but they don't have all that much ability to force silicon vendors to drop support(especially for 7, which is architecturally much closer to 8 than XP is, and actually popular, unlike Vista).
A bit of applied tyranny can be just what certain situations need... (And, by historical standards, Torvalds provides tyranny services at extremely reasonable rates)
Certainly, I'm not inclined to blame people hit by previously-unknown or very low probability issues. That would be as cruel as it is illogical. It's the ones who knowingly act in the face of alarmingly high odds of ghastly outcomes who creep me out.
Does anybody have a plausible guess about what, exactly, the 'slippery slope' is supposed to be leading ominously and inevitably toward?
Not all 'slippery slope' arguments are nonsense, by any means; but I'd be a lot more convinced by this one if I had some idea about the alleged topography of the area around the slope. Are there monkey-men at the bottom? clone Hitler armies? The kwisatz haderach?
Could this be used by lesbian couples in the future to have babies that are biological children of both parents? Obviously, such children would always be daughters, but I'm curious whether this sort of technique would help them.
"Parethenogenesis", in mammals, is still very much in the lab. If memory serves, they've gotten some rabbits and a few mice, and some human demo cells(either not allowed to, or unable to develop past very early stages). I don't think anybody suspects it of being fundamentally intractable; but you can't exactly head down to the local fertility clinic and get it done.
It is unquestionably a dangerously concentrated potential point of failure for a lot of broader economic activity. Whether it has commensurate benefits that would qualify it as 'important' is a slightly different question.
It doesn't really matter since the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction anyway. It wouldn't be much different from the federal government telling states that they can't have their blue laws. In this case it just happens to be car dealers rather than bar owners.
I'd be the first to agree that the feds(the executive branch, no less, get your fucking civics in order, people...) are the wrong place to go; but I'd bet a nontrivial amount of money that the Interestate Commerce Clause is 'elastic' enough to handle this one, if Congress felt like it.
It would be bad form, and strikes me as unlikely to happen; but I suspect that if the feds felt like trying, they'd probably get jurisdiction.
Would it be insufferably pedantic to mention Pioneer 10/11, Explorer 49, Mariner 10, Helios A/B(with Germany), Viking 1 and 2, Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer Venus 1 and 2, ISEE-3(with EU), Magellan, Galileo, Hubble(with EU), Ulysses(with EU), Mars Observer, Clementine, WIND, NEAR Shoemaker, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Pathfinder, ACE, Cassini-Huygens(with EU), Lunar Prospector, DS1, Stardust, Mars Odyssey, Genesis, Mars Exploration Rovers, MESSENGER, Deep Impact, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, New Horizons(in transit), STEREO, Pheonix, Dawn, Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter, Solar Dynamics Observatory, Juno, GRAIL, Mars Science Laboratory, and Radiation Belt Storm Probes?
Sure, our man-in-a-can cred isn't what it used to be; but I, for one, welcome our robotic overlords.
Slashdot Mirror
It's more adorable in fuzzy animals; but it works with humans as well...
If that's idiocy, it's well up into 'indistinguishable from malice' territory.
It's a server side social service from motorola,see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motoblur
Did you see the part of TFA where the user was given no indication that 'motoblur' was active, and the phone was using randomly generated 'motoblur' credentials because it had never even prompted him to create any?
I could understand this if Windows was a free product with an ad-free pro upgrade but for a full product this is inexcusable
Even better, it's a feature that the high-willingness-to-pay corporate market will fucking loath(Oh, sure, we don't mind if our strategy leaks to who-knows-who every time somebody searches for an email...), it's a feature that will just help them look trashy and cheap compared to Apple(who already excels at making their competitors look trashy and cheap), and it is closest to the featureset of a more mature product that Google gives away for free with ads(and Microsoft wants you to pay for).
Should be a big win all around! Then again, though, they've mostly gotten away with it on XBL, so it could be just that bad out there.
Given the rate of success at de-anonymizing all sorts of allegedly-anonymized datasets of any particular interest, it's best to treat 'anonymized' as a mere weasel word, even if it is used in clueless good faith(and it often doesn't even go that far).
I don't know if Fomepizole is superior on some respects to ethanol(lower toxicity, say, allowing you to saturate the patient more heavily); but that's my impression of why it isn't more popular. Now, as any number of contaminated-rotgut-itis demonstrate, just mixing some ethanol with your methanol isn't necessarily good enough to save you; but it apparently can be done correctly.
If I were feeling charitable, I might imagine that he's never used a 'pure' GPS device, only the (sometimes internet connected, sometimes non-IP cellular data) A-GPS gear.
I'm not feeling charitable.
It's possible that Samuelson has spent a little too long living in Bethesda, MD, proud home to a metric fuckton of defense contractors and private sector spook shops...
Is the good Mr. Samuelson aware that 'the internet' is not actually a binary thing(except in certain architectural senses)? It's not like somebody in the control room flips a switch and *boom* TCP-rays fan out, brutally penetrating previously secure systems. You. Have. To. Connect. Things. To. The. Internet. To. Make. Them. Vulnerable. Are there plenty of things connected, that really ought not to be, because people are insufferably cheap and lazy? Sure, hard to argue with that. Does it somehow follow that we would be 'better off without the internet?". Only if you live in a curious universe where you have to shut down the entire internet just to get a few dumb fuckers to airgap their retro SCADA system.
(One might also argue that, if the people who are actually victims of internet attacks, the various companies and banks and things he cites, aren't willing to give up the convenience and low cost of the internet in favor of greater security, it is possible that the alarmist bullshit of people who want a wider remit to expand their paranoid security state online is alarmist bullshit... There is an argument to be made that people who haven't yet been attacked are illogically discounting the costs of future attacks in favor of present savings; but people who are being attacked today are weighing the costs and the benefits of being networked today, and generally staying networked. Go figure...)
./ editors have a special liver that can process it.
If memory serves, the trick to avoiding ill effects with methanol is to not process it. Methanol itself isn't that nasty, with initial effects approximately equivalent to the same amount of ethanol(so you can drink yourself to death; but it takes some work); but you metabolize it into delicious formic acid, which proceeds to do you no good at all. If you can avoid metabolizing it, you'll excrete it reasonably quickly without substantial further harm.
Fomepizole is the fancy, expensive, science-tastic alcohol dehydrogenase competitive inhibitor; Ethanol is the more common and well loved one.
The next question, could this be used as a fuel for long term space travel? Or even just harvested?
Fortunately for anybody planning on travelling at nontrivial fractions of c, less fortunately for anybody planning on gathering fuel, there just isn't much 'there' there. Some denser regions; but plenty of space with less than an atom per cubic centimeter.
This finding could led to the development of a new phase in chemistry - very low temperature chemistry
We are led to believe that chemicals get to mix better when temperatures are applied, but from what I read from TFA, that quantum tunneling process, if we can harness it, could save us a lot of energy in the many laboratories / factories all around the world
I suspect that the degree to which heat-pumping to achieve very, very, low temperatures is a pain in the ass(and quite energy intensive) compared to conventional resistive or combustion heating will limit the economy of using it as a replacement for existing high-temperature processes; but there are probably a lot of interesting products that won't form in useful amounts at modest temperature; but won't survive high temperatures. Those could be very promising candidates...
... worked so well for Nokia ... Not!
On the plus side, this is Zynga we are talking about. In a pleasant inversion of AvP, "Whoever Loses, We Win."
Unless some OEM decides, against all good sense, to either give the corporate market the shaft or to multiply their driver-support headaches by using substantially different hardware, rather than just different plastics kits and other minor differentiation, between 'corporate' and 'home/small business', we'll probably still be seeing Win7 compatible machines for years to come. Unless you are a volume license customer, coming up with a copy of Win7 that passes activation is your problem(so you might want to buy a non-OEM copy, or get some practice at wheedling MS phone support to reactivate you on new motherboards); but hardware shouldn't be a significant issue(outside of specific Wintablets, where 8 may actually be a better choice).
To this day, with something like a year left on the clock, we can still get boring business desktops and laptops with XP support(and not just old stock, though there is plenty of good condition off-lease gear to be had, for crazy cheap, these are fresh-off-the-line new models).
Microsoft has considerable leverage over people who aren't volume customers(a group whose willingness to pay for software MS loves; but which is very inflexible about its upgrade timelines and shitty in-house software), or who don't own 'floating', non-hardware-locked licenses for their OS of choice; but they don't have all that much ability to force silicon vendors to drop support(especially for 7, which is architecturally much closer to 8 than XP is, and actually popular, unlike Vista).
why, he didnt do shit except scream like a tyrant
A bit of applied tyranny can be just what certain situations need... (And, by historical standards, Torvalds provides tyranny services at extremely reasonable rates)
It's not that it "crashed", it's just that we expect it to take an arbitrarily long period of time to start running again...
Linux for Workgroups is the best version
Does it come with LinSock support out of the box?
Certainly, I'm not inclined to blame people hit by previously-unknown or very low probability issues. That would be as cruel as it is illogical. It's the ones who knowingly act in the face of alarmingly high odds of ghastly outcomes who creep me out.
Does anybody have a plausible guess about what, exactly, the 'slippery slope' is supposed to be leading ominously and inevitably toward?
Not all 'slippery slope' arguments are nonsense, by any means; but I'd be a lot more convinced by this one if I had some idea about the alleged topography of the area around the slope. Are there monkey-men at the bottom? clone Hitler armies? The kwisatz haderach?
Could this be used by lesbian couples in the future to have babies that are biological children of both parents? Obviously, such children would always be daughters, but I'm curious whether this sort of technique would help them.
"Parethenogenesis", in mammals, is still very much in the lab. If memory serves, they've gotten some rabbits and a few mice, and some human demo cells(either not allowed to, or unable to develop past very early stages). I don't think anybody suspects it of being fundamentally intractable; but you can't exactly head down to the local fertility clinic and get it done.
What's controversial to me is choosing to have a baby with defects.
Ah, but that's a 100% natural form of child abuse, and we all know that things that are natural are good for us!
It is unquestionably a dangerously concentrated potential point of failure for a lot of broader economic activity. Whether it has commensurate benefits that would qualify it as 'important' is a slightly different question.
How long before advanced aliens experience Paypal's "customer service" and decide to annihilate us all? It'd be hard to blame them.
It doesn't really matter since the federal government doesn't have jurisdiction anyway. It wouldn't be much different from the federal government telling states that they can't have their blue laws. In this case it just happens to be car dealers rather than bar owners.
I'd be the first to agree that the feds(the executive branch, no less, get your fucking civics in order, people...) are the wrong place to go; but I'd bet a nontrivial amount of money that the Interestate Commerce Clause is 'elastic' enough to handle this one, if Congress felt like it.
It would be bad form, and strikes me as unlikely to happen; but I suspect that if the feds felt like trying, they'd probably get jurisdiction.
Would it be insufferably pedantic to mention Pioneer 10/11, Explorer 49, Mariner 10, Helios A/B(with Germany), Viking 1 and 2, Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer Venus 1 and 2, ISEE-3(with EU), Magellan, Galileo, Hubble(with EU), Ulysses(with EU), Mars Observer, Clementine, WIND, NEAR Shoemaker, Mars Global Surveyor, Mars Pathfinder, ACE, Cassini-Huygens(with EU), Lunar Prospector, DS1, Stardust, Mars Odyssey, Genesis, Mars Exploration Rovers, MESSENGER, Deep Impact, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, New Horizons(in transit), STEREO, Pheonix, Dawn, Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter, Solar Dynamics Observatory, Juno, GRAIL, Mars Science Laboratory, and Radiation Belt Storm Probes?
Sure, our man-in-a-can cred isn't what it used to be; but I, for one, welcome our robotic overlords.