"Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that they are able to easily access all the user information they collect and save." and "Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security Agency." The concerns seem like paranoid hand waving to me, but maybe I'm not paranoid enough.
Should you fear Google? No, not until such time a law is passed - and actively enforced - that you must use it for every search, and all other search engines must cease their operations.
Since that's not likely to happen anytime soon, the old medical joke applies:
Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this! Doctor: Don't do that, then.
there is another group at the other end of the scale - video fans who must have the latest and greatest and who will clamor for more and more Gigahertz and gigabytes."
There's an old saying, if you sit down at the poker table and don't know who the sucker is, it's you. Any gamer would be better off saving some money on CPU and spending it on graphics card, memory and SCSI disks. The PC architecture is so unbalanced that the only thing a top-end CPU is good for is boasting about.
What in the blue fuck is so hard about remembering to write "Qaeda" or "Qaida"? Moron.
Actually, since there isn't a 1:1 mapping between Arabic and ASCII, any phonetically similar spelling is as valid as another. I spell it with a "u" because that's how we write in English, and I've no intention of giving the terrorists anything on their terms.
What properties, other than mass and trajectory, are of interest? It's not like they're going to find harmless ones made out of rubber or whatever.
An asteroid made of a nice brittle material could be shattered - a softer or more porous material would have to be deflected. One that's mostly water could be dealt with slowly by focussing sunlight onto it over a period of years, so evaporation alters its trajectory. One that's mostly basalt or iron would require a different strategy.
We really shouldn't worry about things like this until we have to.
You are assuming that WARNING_TIME > DEVELOPMENT_TIME. That's a very dangerous gamble. Sure, cancer kills a lot of people, but it isn't going to kill everyone.
No, just let Mr. Laden say that muslims should strike back with terrorist attacks if the asteroids are harmed. According to Mr Powell that is enough evidence to send the entire US army to 'disarm' the asteroids.
Well, it is conceivable that al-Queda would resist attempts to deal with a dangerous meteorite heading towards Earth on the grounds that Allah sent it, or something.
Would it be feasible to create a tether to low-earth orbit for the express purpose of generating electricity? I wonder how the cost would compare over the long-term to other low-cost sources like wind and nuclear.
No, because it would be very difficult to extract the power in a useful form. Think about it. You've a long conductor with a high potential difference between its ends. How do you tap that without using a second conductor of equal length to get the power back down to Earth? But the second conductor will behave exactly the same as the first, with its own potential difference, so no current will flow!
Palistinian suicide bombers are evil. That does nothing to provide any moral justification for imposing martial law on Palistinians in Isreal, and it does not excuse fifty years of condemnable human rights abuses by the Isreali's.
You do your position no help by being unable to even spell "Palestinian" and "Israeli". This isn't a spelling flame, just a friendly note that if you want to be taken seriously, details do matter. After all, how well can you know the history of the conflict if you can't even spell the names of the major protagonists?
Ummm, reality check? How many hackers do you know who can overpower UNARMED guards? Maybe one who's been eating his/her wheaties?
For a million dollars, a lot of people will do a lot of things. A lot of corporate data is worth a lot more than that. And yes, I've been to facilities like that, and they're more common than you might think.
An attacker can boot up XP and start the Windows 2000 Recovery Console which allows them to operate as any user, even Administrator, without requiring them to enter a password.
Is this something you can't do to a Linux box with boot & root disks? Just mount / and you can do anything you want.
The bottom line is, if you have physical access to the hardware, most OS-level security can be defeated. The only way to secure a machine that isn't under your physical control is by using always-encrypted filesystems. Anyone who writes software that deals with cash or sensitive information has known for decades that you never trust the client device, and you keep the servers in a secure facility, with armed guards if necessary.
That said, logic, sets, graphs, relations, discrete algebra - the "discrete stuff" so to say, is both what I like best and what I think is central to CS
Algebra, set theory (including relational algebra and relational calculus), Boolean algebra, statistics, matrix operations, linear programming.
I've never had to use PDEs, Tensor stuff or even induction since graduating. Of course it depends what sort of programming you want to do. Systems programmers don't it, but an applications programmer in the engineering industry might well do.
And what about costs of the calls/transmissions? If I am in Southwest Asia and someone in the US calls my ENUM, who gets tagged for the long distance bill?
Sounds like a/. poll question. I nominate 'CowboyNeal'.
I answer the home landline nearly 100% of the time. I answer my mobile maybe 70% of the time (depends on location and context). I respond to email at a different frequency to my phone call response. And all that is before we take into account that I have several different email addresses for different purposes, and also four different phone numbers (two home landlines, one mobile, one work).
Having different devices addresses and giving different people different details is a clumsy and inelegant solution. A far better idea is to have one contact number, connecting to any of your devices, and have an intelligent means to sort calls depending on the originator's device and their own identity, then decide what to do with it. You can already do something like this with the smarter mobile phones, using caller groups (my Nokia 6310i can be set to divert a particular caller group to voicemail without ever ringing during certain hours, but ring for them the rest of the time, for example).
I want communication separated out by purpose.
But you don't have that now - you don't know until you answer it that a business contact might have gotten your home number. Or a family member calls your mobile in an emergency. Far better for your phone to take care of that for you. That's what computers are good for, taking care of if-then-else decisions so people don't have to.
If you break it, will you explode into billions of particles?
The danger is that soon enough an Intel processor will get hot enough to trigger a fusion reaction in atmospheric hydrogen, turning Earth into a small star. We must abandon this dangerous obsession with Moore's law before it's too late!
"We chose Oracle and Java because of it's robusticity."
It's strange that IT people resent management's jargon so much, when IT workers spend the day talking about "gentoo" and "linux" and "emacs" and "fdisk" and many, many other words which don't even exist in English. What is it, resentment that there is another group of people with a private language they use amongst themselves? Every group has their own dialect, just listen to doctors or lawyers or auto mechanics talking amongst themselves.
"Going forward" means "in the future", but it implies making events unfold rather than just waiting for things to happen. It's a subtle but important difference. "Leverage" is more than just "use", it implies that the thing you are using gives you a disproportionate advantage, like a lever and a pivot. "Synergy" implies emergent properties of a complex system, not just "things working together".
Frankly, when everyone uses a word, then that becomes a real word. And if you refuse to pick up new words and concepts, you risk irrelevance.
Well, ignoring the power requirements of RAM, bus controllers, network adapters, hard disks which are probably used for boot only...
The cost of powering the computers themselves pales compared to cost of the air conditioning for the data centre. That is the single biggest cost, in a data center in New York it even outweighs rent!
My god, I thought they had trouble scaling Linux that far. Seriously. How the hell do you do that when "stock" linux doesnt like 8 CPUs?
Because it's not a single system image. Rendering movies is easy to parallelize because you don't need to have once scene rendered before you can render the next; all the information you need is in the model file.
Yes, it's legal, but is it a good idea? There is a loophole in representative democracy which leaves it open to manipulation by this type of vote-shuffling - in a population of 5^n, 3^n can outvote everyone else if they're well placed. I would say that this is far, far worse for democracy than the recent irregularities in Florida, because this is now institutionalized.
Slashdot Mirror
was pretty accurate.
Falling Down was more accurate.
"Google has no data retention policies. There is evidence that they are able to easily access all the user information they collect and save." and "Matt Cutts, a key Google engineer, used to work for the National Security Agency." The concerns seem like paranoid hand waving to me, but maybe I'm not paranoid enough.
Should you fear Google? No, not until such time a law is passed - and actively enforced - that you must use it for every search, and all other search engines must cease their operations.
Since that's not likely to happen anytime soon, the old medical joke applies:
Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I do this!
Doctor: Don't do that, then.
Most IM systems are OS agnostic. Do you think MS will publish their protocol?
Actually, Microsoft submitted the protocol to the IETF and it's all documented here.
there is another group at the other end of the scale - video fans who must have the latest and greatest and who will clamor for more and more Gigahertz and gigabytes."
There's an old saying, if you sit down at the poker table and don't know who the sucker is, it's you. Any gamer would be better off saving some money on CPU and spending it on graphics card, memory and SCSI disks. The PC architecture is so unbalanced that the only thing a top-end CPU is good for is boasting about.
What in the blue fuck is so hard about remembering to write "Qaeda" or "Qaida"? Moron.
Actually, since there isn't a 1:1 mapping between Arabic and ASCII, any phonetically similar spelling is as valid as another. I spell it with a "u" because that's how we write in English, and I've no intention of giving the terrorists anything on their terms.
What properties, other than mass and trajectory, are of interest? It's not like they're going to find harmless ones made out of rubber or whatever.
An asteroid made of a nice brittle material could be shattered - a softer or more porous material would have to be deflected. One that's mostly water could be dealt with slowly by focussing sunlight onto it over a period of years, so evaporation alters its trajectory. One that's mostly basalt or iron would require a different strategy.
We really shouldn't worry about things like this until we have to.
You are assuming that WARNING_TIME > DEVELOPMENT_TIME. That's a very dangerous gamble. Sure, cancer kills a lot of people, but it isn't going to kill everyone.
No, just let Mr. Laden say that muslims should strike back with terrorist attacks if the asteroids are harmed. According to Mr Powell that is enough evidence to send the entire US army to 'disarm' the asteroids.
Well, it is conceivable that al-Queda would resist attempts to deal with a dangerous meteorite heading towards Earth on the grounds that Allah sent it, or something.
Would it be feasible to create a tether to low-earth orbit for the express purpose of generating electricity? I wonder how the cost would compare over the long-term to other low-cost sources like wind and nuclear.
No, because it would be very difficult to extract the power in a useful form. Think about it. You've a long conductor with a high potential difference between its ends. How do you tap that without using a second conductor of equal length to get the power back down to Earth? But the second conductor will behave exactly the same as the first, with its own potential difference, so no current will flow!
Palistinian suicide bombers are evil. That does nothing to provide any moral justification for imposing martial law on Palistinians in Isreal, and it does not excuse fifty years of condemnable human rights abuses by the Isreali's.
You do your position no help by being unable to even spell "Palestinian" and "Israeli". This isn't a spelling flame, just a friendly note that if you want to be taken seriously, details do matter. After all, how well can you know the history of the conflict if you can't even spell the names of the major protagonists?
Ummm, reality check? How many hackers do you know who can overpower UNARMED guards? Maybe one who's been eating his/her wheaties?
For a million dollars, a lot of people will do a lot of things. A lot of corporate data is worth a lot more than that. And yes, I've been to facilities like that, and they're more common than you might think.
An attacker can boot up XP and start the Windows 2000 Recovery Console which allows them to operate as any user, even Administrator, without requiring them to enter a password.
Is this something you can't do to a Linux box with boot & root disks? Just mount / and you can do anything you want.
The bottom line is, if you have physical access to the hardware, most OS-level security can be defeated. The only way to secure a machine that isn't under your physical control is by using always-encrypted filesystems. Anyone who writes software that deals with cash or sensitive information has known for decades that you never trust the client device, and you keep the servers in a secure facility, with armed guards if necessary.
That said, logic, sets, graphs, relations, discrete algebra - the "discrete stuff" so to say, is both what I like best and what I think is central to CS
Algebra, set theory (including relational algebra and relational calculus), Boolean algebra, statistics, matrix operations, linear programming.
I've never had to use PDEs, Tensor stuff or even induction since graduating. Of course it depends what sort of programming you want to do. Systems programmers don't it, but an applications programmer in the engineering industry might well do.
And what about costs of the calls/transmissions? If I am in Southwest Asia and someone in the US calls my ENUM, who gets tagged for the long distance bill?
/. poll question. I nominate 'CowboyNeal'.
Sounds like a
I answer the home landline nearly 100% of the time. I answer my mobile maybe 70% of the time (depends on location and context). I respond to email at a different frequency to my phone call response. And all that is before we take into account that I have several different email addresses for different purposes, and also four different phone numbers (two home landlines, one mobile, one work).
Having different devices addresses and giving different people different details is a clumsy and inelegant solution. A far better idea is to have one contact number, connecting to any of your devices, and have an intelligent means to sort calls depending on the originator's device and their own identity, then decide what to do with it. You can already do something like this with the smarter mobile phones, using caller groups (my Nokia 6310i can be set to divert a particular caller group to voicemail without ever ringing during certain hours, but ring for them the rest of the time, for example).
I want communication separated out by purpose.
But you don't have that now - you don't know until you answer it that a business contact might have gotten your home number. Or a family member calls your mobile in an emergency. Far better for your phone to take care of that for you. That's what computers are good for, taking care of if-then-else decisions so people don't have to.
USA is a Plutocracy. Admit it. Realize it. Fix it.
Absolutely. I am a big believer in equality. Everyone with the same vote should contribute the same amount to the public purse.
And the world can see what the DoD are using. I'd love to submit patches to the armed forces.
Nah, they'd only sew the patches to their sleeves.
Please concede the possibility that the people with PhD's and 20 years of experience might actually know what they are doing here.
Oh, I expect they did. Except it wasn't aerospace engineering, it was job security and contract padding.
If you break it, will you explode into billions of particles?
The danger is that soon enough an Intel processor will get hot enough to trigger a fusion reaction in atmospheric hydrogen, turning Earth into a small star. We must abandon this dangerous obsession with Moore's law before it's too late!
"We chose Oracle and Java because of it's robusticity."
It's strange that IT people resent management's jargon so much, when IT workers spend the day talking about "gentoo" and "linux" and "emacs" and "fdisk" and many, many other words which don't even exist in English. What is it, resentment that there is another group of people with a private language they use amongst themselves? Every group has their own dialect, just listen to doctors or lawyers or auto mechanics talking amongst themselves.
"Going forward" means "in the future", but it implies making events unfold rather than just waiting for things to happen. It's a subtle but important difference. "Leverage" is more than just "use", it implies that the thing you are using gives you a disproportionate advantage, like a lever and a pivot. "Synergy" implies emergent properties of a complex system, not just "things working together".
Frankly, when everyone uses a word, then that becomes a real word. And if you refuse to pick up new words and concepts, you risk irrelevance.
at infinite typewriters eventually produce the great works of shakespear?
That theory was proved false by the invention of Usenet.
They should have called it the UltraCancelotron 5000XX or something.
Well, ignoring the power requirements of RAM, bus controllers, network adapters, hard disks which are probably used for boot only...
The cost of powering the computers themselves pales compared to cost of the air conditioning for the data centre. That is the single biggest cost, in a data center in New York it even outweighs rent!
My god, I thought they had trouble scaling Linux that far. Seriously. How the hell do you do that when "stock" linux doesnt like 8 CPUs?
Because it's not a single system image. Rendering movies is easy to parallelize because you don't need to have once scene rendered before you can render the next; all the information you need is in the model file.
Yes, it's legal, but is it a good idea? There is a loophole in representative democracy which leaves it open to manipulation by this type of vote-shuffling - in a population of 5^n, 3^n can outvote everyone else if they're well placed. I would say that this is far, far worse for democracy than the recent irregularities in Florida, because this is now institutionalized.