That's what surprised me. I assumed that the assertion that we'd provided our printers with law degrees would be absurd on its face. Maybe slashdot knows something about the falling admissions standards of degree mills that I don't.
(though, in theory, a multifunction printer whose postscript interpreter has access to scanned documents should, probably with a major RAM upgrade, be capable of taking a bar exam if sent an appropriately structured postscript file...)
It sounds like a (poor) attempt to describe being handed a burned DVD with a bunch of DICOM files on it and some shitty EZreaderlitecrippleware.exe application set to autorun.
If you've never had the pleasure of being sick enough to get them to break out the cool diagnostic imaging gear, it might well have come as a surprise to you that that's how it works. However, describing the process of typing "Linux DICOM viewer" into google and trying a few things as "hacking the files" seems a bit much...
"Send us videos, poems, images, audio or text that you see as relevant to a scenario in which art and creativity can help form a complete and ongoing cure."
Cancer does not work that way.
While it isn't really 'creativity' in a cognitive sense, there is a strong case to be made that the incredible pace and breadth of adaptation among cancer cells(which quickly leads to all sorts of neat tricks like chemo resistance, the ability to burrow through barrier tissues, immortality, and the capacity to stimulate the diversion of nutrients and oxygen for their own use) is a demonstration of how creativity spits in the face of a complete and ongoing cure, steals its lunch money, and then curb stomps it...
TFA is entirely worthless; but the stuff showing up on Google images for this little fiasco shows strip-cut material that hasn't even been fed into the shredder in the correct direction(so the strips tend to include entire lines, rather than mere fragments) unless our dear intertubes are lying, somebody did an atypically bad shredding job, even by the standards of small-business-who-buys-their-shredding-through-staples standards.
You really think the 'commercial' document shredder companies do what they say? No, they take the paper or hard disks or whatever off your hands and now your manager has a false sense of security.
What does the shredder company do: they try to make money on both ends. Selling large amounts of recycled paper as confetti paper is a pretty good deal as a) they get paid for it and b) the confetti company doesn't have to pay for brand new paper.
Do you really think the hard disks you gave them will get shredded as they say? No, it will get taken apart and the individual pieces (rare earth magnets, platters etc.) will get recycled wherever it is cheapest.
I'm pretty sure that the ones who bring containerized/tractor-trailer-installed shredders to your site and allow you to watch the sweet, sweet, destruction are probably not lying, since they have little ability to resist trivial inspection. Anybody else, for reasons totally unrelated to having to do real work, rather than 'ensuring secure document lifecycle management' by watching huge shredders get their shred on, I heartily distrust.
I think you'd need to ensure your sensitive documents were pulped, rather than simply shredded. Much harder to piece together paper machet'
It's a question of volume. Once you start shoving serious quantities of paper, you should really look into sending all your printers and copiers to law school, and retooling the UIs and print drivers so that all printing automatically takes place in the context of attorney-client privilege.
Thanks to the magic of inexpensive ethernet-attached printers and online degree mills, all the printers that the C-levels and above use are doctors as well as lawyers, and we imported a HIPPApotamus to guard the filing cabinets. It doesn't get more secure than that!
Unless the evidence just *magically* disappears from the hands of the people who collected it and took pictures at the parade, we pretty much have to accept that shredded documents did end up getting tossed around like confetti.
That done, we get into the question of where in the chain from NYPD filing cabinet to document disposal company to recycler, to party supplier some deeply underprocessed documents made it into the final product...
Does NYPD not even cross-cut onsite? Fuck, my workplace does that(paper, HDD, and tape) and we don't exactly have people who infiltrate the mob for a living. Did the 'secure document lifecycle solutions' vendor cut some serious corners? Is there a bulk confetti supplier who is cutting the product with material from the shred stream in order to lower processing costs?
I'm no crypto expert; but it was my layman's understanding that the bitcoin setup is(barring presently unknown attacks) unforgeable; but that there is nothing particularly special about the "Genesis block" at the beginning of the bitcoin block chain, aside from mutual acceptance of it.
Given that, while it is not possible to forge a bitcoin or to produce more than 21,000,000 of them, it should be possible for anybody who feels like it to simply define a new Genesis block and go hashing merrily away. The products of this block chain will be distinguishable from the products of any other block chain; but user convention could assign them value in exactly the same way as it did the old ones(or, more probably, they would trade at a discount against the 'original' bitcoins).
Any speculation on whether the people-who-care-about-bitcoins of the world are sufficiently rabid about some sort of deflationary theory of currency to prevent that, or will we start seeing N different distinct block chains trading between one another as well as select real world commodities?
Rancid is arguably the contemporary equivalent. At the user end, you get all the convenience of revision control and versioning for your configurations; but the actual 'make-it-so' layer that turns the configuration you define into a properly configured device is handled in the background by a scripted process that logs in, makes config changes, collects data, and so on.
It is mostly aimed at fancier switches, rather than cheapie endpoint devices; but adding device support through modules is doable and might be worth a look in this case(especially if the SNMP-foo of some of the devices is very weak, as a poster above claimed).
I think most people with a brain would agree, complete rule by any single party is asking for disaster.
Oh, I'm no friend of one-party rule; but my impression has been that the contemporary crowing from both democratic and republican sides on the subject has been shallow, vapid, and largely meaningless in relation to any serious risk of 'one party rule' in the sense practiced in places named "The people's democratic republic of somethingorother"... The republicans had Rove's oleaginous dreams of a 'permanent majority', which dissolved in the cruel face of reality about as fast as PNAC's theories of a Pax Americana in the middle east. The democrats had their optimism about getting turnout that doesn't suck from demographics that don't usually vote, which lasted a mere couple of years until the 2010 midterms. Then the tea party wing had their moment of optimism, because of the congressional upsets in 2010, which has since been evaporating in the face of Obama's re-election. And so the wheel grinds on.
America really dodged a bullet not getting stuck with this kind of leadership.
Frankly, any allegedly 'small government republicans' also dodged a bullet: Not only was ORCA a total clusterfuck from an IT nerd perspective, its premise fundamentally involved replacing the traditional, decentralized, somewhat-ideosyncratic-but-built-on-local-institutions-and-people-and-pretty-resilient, get out the vote mechanism with a shiny, centralized, technocratic "Solution" run from Romney HQ. As it turned out, the system didn't even work correctly; but (even if it had) it was basically founded on the same organizational model as assorted much-beloathed federal agencies that attempt to provide centralized management of things like education and whatnot.
But all of the sites he mentioned are not in the business to "help" anyone. They're all in it to make money.
The problem is not so much that they are in it to make money(indeed, it is rather convenient if somebody can do well by doing good, since they might actually continue to do so). The problem is that, particularly in Ebay's case, 'doing well' and 'doing good' are somewhat divergent objectives and the former has been steadily gaining ground on the latter for years now.
The Democrats in 2008 scared the hell out of me. They were spouting things like "we will rule for a generation". They scared everyone else too, when you look at what happened in 2010.
Where they actually that different from the "permanent Republican majority" fantasists who they swept out of office in 2008? Hubristic interpretation of immediate political gains as portents of inevitable future victory is foolish; but seems extremely common.
I need a foreign country that is more conservative than the US to move to.
I believe Afghanistan is like that. Iran as well. East Germany was as well. Be careful what you wish for.
I get the impression that the grandparent poster was looking for a 'renfaire reactionary' conservative country to move to: ie. one that has lots of squalid peasants; but where he gets to be a nobleman...
It's not that difficult, really. For one, you don't have to keep the entire world map in memory, or even on disk. With a procedural generation you can begin with a random seed and feed that into the generator. Then save that random seed. Wherever the character goes, the local area can be created with a combination of that random seed and the current X,Y[,Z] coordinates. This means very little stays in memory or on the disk, you just need to know 1) where you are and 2) what your original random seed was.
It isn't difficult if you are willing to settle for 'pretty damn huge'. It gets rather trickier if you want 'arbitrarily large' or 'infinite'. Unless the world has edges(or some sort of edgeless-but-closed geometry) the memory consumption of storing the X,Y,Z tuple alone can grow without bound. You probably won't have trouble with maps far larger than you need; but you'll need to find an infinite tape for your turing machine before handling arbitrarily large or infinite maps...
In fact surely by definition an infinite world will repeat itself due to it being infinite and therefore an infinite amount of repetition?
The set of integers is infinite; but has no repeated elements. There isn't anything forbidding an infinite world from being repetitive; but infinite size does not require repetition.
It doesn't help that the ITU is basically the UN for the Ma Bells of the world... They did a technologically adequate job of ensuring that the hapless customer of incumbent telco A in country B can call the hapless customer of state monopoly telco C in country D; but it's a great deal harder to get excited about bringing them back into the picture when you are starting with a superior successor to antiquated phone systems.
It'd be like putting the RIAA in charge of digital music distribution. Sure, they did some actually useful tech work on record grooves and equalization curves; but they have some serious personality defects and no obvious superiority over any number of other technically adept entities.
I'm pretty sure that having the EU tell you "STFU and leave it to the yanks" is one of the harsher put-downs that a multinational treaty organization can suffer...
The Namid Desert Beatle is a badass, of that there can be no doubt; but it also exists in a highly peculiar environment: practically zero precipitation; but fairly reliable daily fog rolling in, available to be collected. In an environment where the peaks and valleys of ambient humidity are less dramatic, and it either just rains fairly frequently, or is dry all the time, its extremely clever surface structure would be for nothing.
How much of the world actually encounters regular airborne water but virtually no usable rain?
I am perpetually impressed by how useful mathematics derived from a few abstract axioms can actually be in modelling the real world. Further, it is always fascinating to see the strange overlaps where a single mathematical abstraction proves useful in the examination of two seemingly unrelated phenomena...
It is apparently so; but the idea that waves made of seawater and 'waves' that function as models of certain aspects of the behavior of electromagnetic radiation is always deeply surprising.
The most that can really be said is the 600 euro fine (and the non-disclosure agreement) is absurd for what the alleged crime is.
I am hard pressed to think of a situation where the cause of justice could possibly be served by the authorities demanding a gag order as part of a prosecution.
During the process of evidence collection, when they might tip off somebody else involved in the case, there is at least a cogent argument to be made(though this situation is dangerously vulnerable to abuse, *cough* 'national security letters' *cough*), and there are also arguments in favor of NDAs for the benefit of the suspect or perpetrator(for the suspect, to protect them from a media frenzy and the usual 'charged = guilty' reporting, especially in the case of emotive stuff like kiddie fiddling, the perp similarly, if there is reason to believe that they will get lynched on the outside); but what argument can be made for an NDA in favor of the authorities?
Surely, they would want the public to see justice being done? Surely, they would be delighted to have an example of a criminal receiving just punishment be visible? Certainly, they would not mind having an opposing attorney scrutinize their no-doubt-iron-clad case? Prosecutorial secrecy reeks of impropriety...
Just come up with a 'reasonable accomodation' that will allow a sociopath to exercise a position of power and discretion without dangerous fuckups, and we'll talk...
There are two concurrent Samsung Chromebook versions:
The "Samsung Chromebook" ($249) is the ARM based one that is more or less a tablet motherboard in a laptop skin.
The "Samsung Chromebook 550($449) is based on whatever Intel is calling their Celeron-class CPUs these days, and is the successor to the one in the teardown above. Both, to the best of my knowledge, are build like more-or-less normal thin-n-lights on the inside, so there are some swappable parts.
The one in the teardown, if memory serves, is Samsung's slightly modified and bulked up version of the (atom based) CR-48 that Google initially released as a test/dev device for the Chromebook concept.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what surprised me. I assumed that the assertion that we'd provided our printers with law degrees would be absurd on its face. Maybe slashdot knows something about the falling admissions standards of degree mills that I don't.
(though, in theory, a multifunction printer whose postscript interpreter has access to scanned documents should, probably with a major RAM upgrade, be capable of taking a bar exam if sent an appropriately structured postscript file...)
It sounds like a (poor) attempt to describe being handed a burned DVD with a bunch of DICOM files on it and some shitty EZreaderlitecrippleware.exe application set to autorun.
If you've never had the pleasure of being sick enough to get them to break out the cool diagnostic imaging gear, it might well have come as a surprise to you that that's how it works. However, describing the process of typing "Linux DICOM viewer" into google and trying a few things as "hacking the files" seems a bit much...
"Send us videos, poems, images, audio or text that you see as relevant to a scenario in which art and creativity can help form a complete and ongoing cure."
Cancer does not work that way.
While it isn't really 'creativity' in a cognitive sense, there is a strong case to be made that the incredible pace and breadth of adaptation among cancer cells(which quickly leads to all sorts of neat tricks like chemo resistance, the ability to burrow through barrier tissues, immortality, and the capacity to stimulate the diversion of nutrients and oxygen for their own use) is a demonstration of how creativity spits in the face of a complete and ongoing cure, steals its lunch money, and then curb stomps it...
It also sounds like Sturgeon's law is having a field day among some of the contributors...
TFA is entirely worthless; but the stuff showing up on Google images for this little fiasco shows strip-cut material that hasn't even been fed into the shredder in the correct direction(so the strips tend to include entire lines, rather than mere fragments) unless our dear intertubes are lying, somebody did an atypically bad shredding job, even by the standards of small-business-who-buys-their-shredding-through-staples standards.
You really think the 'commercial' document shredder companies do what they say? No, they take the paper or hard disks or whatever off your hands and now your manager has a false sense of security.
What does the shredder company do: they try to make money on both ends. Selling large amounts of recycled paper as confetti paper is a pretty good deal as a) they get paid for it and b) the confetti company doesn't have to pay for brand new paper.
Do you really think the hard disks you gave them will get shredded as they say? No, it will get taken apart and the individual pieces (rare earth magnets, platters etc.) will get recycled wherever it is cheapest.
I'm pretty sure that the ones who bring containerized/tractor-trailer-installed shredders to your site and allow you to watch the sweet, sweet, destruction are probably not lying, since they have little ability to resist trivial inspection. Anybody else, for reasons totally unrelated to having to do real work, rather than 'ensuring secure document lifecycle management' by watching huge shredders get their shred on, I heartily distrust.
I think you'd need to ensure your sensitive documents were pulped, rather than simply shredded. Much harder to piece together paper machet'
It's a question of volume. Once you start shoving serious quantities of paper, you should really look into sending all your printers and copiers to law school, and retooling the UIs and print drivers so that all printing automatically takes place in the context of attorney-client privilege.
Thanks to the magic of inexpensive ethernet-attached printers and online degree mills, all the printers that the C-levels and above use are doctors as well as lawyers, and we imported a HIPPApotamus to guard the filing cabinets. It doesn't get more secure than that!
Unless the evidence just *magically* disappears from the hands of the people who collected it and took pictures at the parade, we pretty much have to accept that shredded documents did end up getting tossed around like confetti.
That done, we get into the question of where in the chain from NYPD filing cabinet to document disposal company to recycler, to party supplier some deeply underprocessed documents made it into the final product...
Does NYPD not even cross-cut onsite? Fuck, my workplace does that(paper, HDD, and tape) and we don't exactly have people who infiltrate the mob for a living. Did the 'secure document lifecycle solutions' vendor cut some serious corners? Is there a bulk confetti supplier who is cutting the product with material from the shred stream in order to lower processing costs?
I'm no crypto expert; but it was my layman's understanding that the bitcoin setup is(barring presently unknown attacks) unforgeable; but that there is nothing particularly special about the "Genesis block" at the beginning of the bitcoin block chain, aside from mutual acceptance of it.
Given that, while it is not possible to forge a bitcoin or to produce more than 21,000,000 of them, it should be possible for anybody who feels like it to simply define a new Genesis block and go hashing merrily away. The products of this block chain will be distinguishable from the products of any other block chain; but user convention could assign them value in exactly the same way as it did the old ones(or, more probably, they would trade at a discount against the 'original' bitcoins).
Any speculation on whether the people-who-care-about-bitcoins of the world are sufficiently rabid about some sort of deflationary theory of currency to prevent that, or will we start seeing N different distinct block chains trading between one another as well as select real world commodities?
Doesn't anybody do that anymore?
Rancid is arguably the contemporary equivalent. At the user end, you get all the convenience of revision control and versioning for your configurations; but the actual 'make-it-so' layer that turns the configuration you define into a properly configured device is handled in the background by a scripted process that logs in, makes config changes, collects data, and so on.
It is mostly aimed at fancier switches, rather than cheapie endpoint devices; but adding device support through modules is doable and might be worth a look in this case(especially if the SNMP-foo of some of the devices is very weak, as a poster above claimed).
I think most people with a brain would agree, complete rule by any single party is asking for disaster.
Oh, I'm no friend of one-party rule; but my impression has been that the contemporary crowing from both democratic and republican sides on the subject has been shallow, vapid, and largely meaningless in relation to any serious risk of 'one party rule' in the sense practiced in places named "The people's democratic republic of somethingorother"... The republicans had Rove's oleaginous dreams of a 'permanent majority', which dissolved in the cruel face of reality about as fast as PNAC's theories of a Pax Americana in the middle east. The democrats had their optimism about getting turnout that doesn't suck from demographics that don't usually vote, which lasted a mere couple of years until the 2010 midterms. Then the tea party wing had their moment of optimism, because of the congressional upsets in 2010, which has since been evaporating in the face of Obama's re-election. And so the wheel grinds on.
The real story is that the Romney team didn't have the tiniest shred of competence. They proved themselves overly secretive (bordering on paranoid) and so arrogant that they didn't think standard practices in software development and delivery applied to their "special" campaign.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/burns-haberman/2012/11/romneys-fail-whale-orca-the-votetracker-149098.html
America really dodged a bullet not getting stuck with this kind of leadership.
Frankly, any allegedly 'small government republicans' also dodged a bullet: Not only was ORCA a total clusterfuck from an IT nerd perspective, its premise fundamentally involved replacing the traditional, decentralized, somewhat-ideosyncratic-but-built-on-local-institutions-and-people-and-pretty-resilient, get out the vote mechanism with a shiny, centralized, technocratic "Solution" run from Romney HQ. As it turned out, the system didn't even work correctly; but (even if it had) it was basically founded on the same organizational model as assorted much-beloathed federal agencies that attempt to provide centralized management of things like education and whatnot.
But all of the sites he mentioned are not in the business to "help" anyone.
They're all in it to make money.
The problem is not so much that they are in it to make money(indeed, it is rather convenient if somebody can do well by doing good, since they might actually continue to do so). The problem is that, particularly in Ebay's case, 'doing well' and 'doing good' are somewhat divergent objectives and the former has been steadily gaining ground on the latter for years now.
The Democrats in 2008 scared the hell out of me. They were spouting things like "we will rule for a generation". They scared everyone else too, when you look at what happened in 2010.
Where they actually that different from the "permanent Republican majority" fantasists who they swept out of office in 2008? Hubristic interpretation of immediate political gains as portents of inevitable future victory is foolish; but seems extremely common.
But are there any religious libertarians who believe that the government should outsource the running of your private life to churches?
I need a foreign country that is more conservative than the US to move to.
I believe Afghanistan is like that. Iran as well. East Germany was as well. Be careful what you wish for.
I get the impression that the grandparent poster was looking for a 'renfaire reactionary' conservative country to move to: ie. one that has lots of squalid peasants; but where he gets to be a nobleman...
It's not that difficult, really. For one, you don't have to keep the entire world map in memory, or even on disk. With a procedural generation you can begin with a random seed and feed that into the generator. Then save that random seed. Wherever the character goes, the local area can be created with a combination of that random seed and the current X,Y[,Z] coordinates. This means very little stays in memory or on the disk, you just need to know 1) where you are and 2) what your original random seed was.
It isn't difficult if you are willing to settle for 'pretty damn huge'. It gets rather trickier if you want 'arbitrarily large' or 'infinite'. Unless the world has edges(or some sort of edgeless-but-closed geometry) the memory consumption of storing the X,Y,Z tuple alone can grow without bound. You probably won't have trouble with maps far larger than you need; but you'll need to find an infinite tape for your turing machine before handling arbitrarily large or infinite maps...
In fact surely by definition an infinite world will repeat itself due to it being infinite and therefore an infinite amount of repetition?
The set of integers is infinite; but has no repeated elements. There isn't anything forbidding an infinite world from being repetitive; but infinite size does not require repetition.
It doesn't help that the ITU is basically the UN for the Ma Bells of the world... They did a technologically adequate job of ensuring that the hapless customer of incumbent telco A in country B can call the hapless customer of state monopoly telco C in country D; but it's a great deal harder to get excited about bringing them back into the picture when you are starting with a superior successor to antiquated phone systems.
It'd be like putting the RIAA in charge of digital music distribution. Sure, they did some actually useful tech work on record grooves and equalization curves; but they have some serious personality defects and no obvious superiority over any number of other technically adept entities.
I'm pretty sure that having the EU tell you "STFU and leave it to the yanks" is one of the harsher put-downs that a multinational treaty organization can suffer...
The Namid Desert Beatle is a badass, of that there can be no doubt; but it also exists in a highly peculiar environment: practically zero precipitation; but fairly reliable daily fog rolling in, available to be collected. In an environment where the peaks and valleys of ambient humidity are less dramatic, and it either just rains fairly frequently, or is dry all the time, its extremely clever surface structure would be for nothing.
How much of the world actually encounters regular airborne water but virtually no usable rain?
I am perpetually impressed by how useful mathematics derived from a few abstract axioms can actually be in modelling the real world. Further, it is always fascinating to see the strange overlaps where a single mathematical abstraction proves useful in the examination of two seemingly unrelated phenomena...
It is apparently so; but the idea that waves made of seawater and 'waves' that function as models of certain aspects of the behavior of electromagnetic radiation is always deeply surprising.
The most that can really be said is the 600 euro fine (and the non-disclosure agreement) is absurd for what the alleged crime is.
I am hard pressed to think of a situation where the cause of justice could possibly be served by the authorities demanding a gag order as part of a prosecution.
During the process of evidence collection, when they might tip off somebody else involved in the case, there is at least a cogent argument to be made(though this situation is dangerously vulnerable to abuse, *cough* 'national security letters' *cough*), and there are also arguments in favor of NDAs for the benefit of the suspect or perpetrator(for the suspect, to protect them from a media frenzy and the usual 'charged = guilty' reporting, especially in the case of emotive stuff like kiddie fiddling, the perp similarly, if there is reason to believe that they will get lynched on the outside); but what argument can be made for an NDA in favor of the authorities?
Surely, they would want the public to see justice being done? Surely, they would be delighted to have an example of a criminal receiving just punishment be visible? Certainly, they would not mind having an opposing attorney scrutinize their no-doubt-iron-clad case? Prosecutorial secrecy reeks of impropriety...
Just come up with a 'reasonable accomodation' that will allow a sociopath to exercise a position of power and discretion without dangerous fuckups, and we'll talk...
There are two concurrent Samsung Chromebook versions:
The "Samsung Chromebook" ($249) is the ARM based one that is more or less a tablet motherboard in a laptop skin.
The "Samsung Chromebook 550($449) is based on whatever Intel is calling their Celeron-class CPUs these days, and is the successor to the one in the teardown above. Both, to the best of my knowledge, are build like more-or-less normal thin-n-lights on the inside, so there are some swappable parts.
The one in the teardown, if memory serves, is Samsung's slightly modified and bulked up version of the (atom based) CR-48 that Google initially released as a test/dev device for the Chromebook concept.