Perhaps someone caught up in the spirit of World Backup Day would be kind enough to offer me some advice?
I've got a Mac, but it triple-boots OS X, Windows 7, and Ubuntu 10.04, through a combination of rEFI, grub, and an unhealthy GPT-MBR hybrid partition scheme. Is there any single tool that I can use to back up my whole disk? I'd like to not run individual backup solutions on each operating system, but at the same time, I'd like to backup on a per-file basis, instead of just cloning the whole disk every week or whatever. Is there any single tool out there that will do this, if I were to mount the other two OS partitions in the third?
The issue is that without the essential freedoms to study, modify and distribute copies of the software, users are at a disadvantage to the developer and that's unjust.
Before parroting boilerplate lines, could you please make an effort to understand the context of what people are talking about? Your quote is great for talking about Matlab or something; here, it makes no sense.
You can already "study" Google's Javascript code: like you said, you can look at it. You can already "modify" Google's Javascript code, just like you can modify any other Javascript code. Try it sometime: type "javascript:foo();" into your browser and watch the magic happen. Nothing is stopping you from disabling Google's Javascript altogether and setting your own scripts to run every time you open mail.google.com. You could even share your custom Javascript with other people if they want to use it: behold, you're distributing copies. What rights, exactly, are you arguing for? And what are you talking about, "disadvantage to the developer"? You can see exactly what the Javascript does, and you can disable or modify some or all of it at your whim.
How much would this have cost before the Kinect came out?
A lot. Please see an earlier comment I made on the exact same issue: prior to the launch of the Kinect, if you wanted an accurate depth map on a robot, you had to use LIDAR sensors. Not only are those expensive, but they're both heavy and somewhat unreliable (since they have moving parts in the form of rapidly spinning mirrors) which rules out mounting them on a copter. There are ways to estimate depth from 2D images alone, but then accuracy suffers immensely. With Kinect you get the best of both worlds.
To the Ivy League engineers out there
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 1
If you had, y'know, read the article (or even the summary) you would've seen them point out that the issue is not whether John Q. Driver can get from place to place, but how there are a lot of invisible applications, like synchronizing the US power grid, that have grown to rely on GPS. Those are the things that are in danger from intentional or unintentional jamming, no one cares about navigation.
The worst part about this is that the solution is not as easy as this article makes it out to be. GPS signals have to be as weak as they are by design- you just can't get much more transmitting power into those satellites, and while LORAN might help, I don't think it has the accuracy either in positioning or in timing that a lot of applications need. It does highlight the necessity for these devices to "fail gracefully" instead of catastrophically though.
That's a good way to automatically lose your case and get the steepest possible punishment. Judges hate, hate people who destroy relevant evidence, and even if you securely erase the data itself, forensics teams can often tell that you erased something in the first place (and if he did that, Hotz would have to explain why he didn't have any data relating to this project he spend so much time on). I'm sure it's possible to erase things in such a fashion as to avoid leaving evidence that I ever performed an erasure, but I sure wouldn't want to chance it in his situation, especially when it doesn't look like Sony has an especially strong case.
If you're not a high-priority target or planning on creating civil unrest, than this restrictive government doesn't care about you. If you are, then encryption isn't going to save you. They'll either pull off some side-channel attack, like a rootkit on your phone that no amount of encryption is going to subvert, or just throw you in jail for using encryption at all.
I'm all for security, but a lot of Slashdotters really need a sense of perspective.
It's revolutionary because prior to the launch of the Kinect, if you wanted both visual input and a depth map on a robot, you had to spend hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars on LIDAR sensors, which are fussy pieces of equipment at the best of times. Within its design range, Kinect is as accurate as any LIDAR sensor, much more reliable, and waaaaay cheaper. For this reason, a lot of robot designers don't bother with LIDAR, which means you have to estimate distance and range with GPS, direct image data, or a host of other not-quite-as-accurate means. Not to mention it handles skeletal tracking, gesture recognition and other unpleasant programming tasks itself, leaving the robot designer free to do other things.
Kinect really has kind of changed the game overnight. People are very excited about being able to equip accurate depth sensors on all kinds of robots that they wouldn't have bothered with before. Even if no "new" innovations were to ever appear from Kinect, the increase in accuracy of old standbys like manipulator arms will be tremendous now that they can have depth maps. I'm at Cornell at the moment, and many of the grad students in robotics already have Kinect-based projects well underway, and even in the undergrad robot learning classes (where you typically do one semester-long project) the professor is pushing Kinect as an option.
Hate to put a damper on things, but the only reason this failed was that the Republicans assumed that passage was a fait accompli, so they pushed it in under an expediting procedure that requires a two-thirds vote, and the bill only failed that by 7 votes. All they have to do is reintroduce it under the usual majority vote rule and it will be a done deal.
Though I will admit, for the first time since I became aware of their existence I feel something other than blinding hatred for the Tea Party, who are basically responsible for the Republicans not having enough votes. Looks like some of them really do care about civil liberties, and for that at least they should be congratulated.
Save your praise: most of the Republicans actually supported extension. It only failed by seven votes, and that because almost every Democrat and some of the Tea Party newcomers opposed it.
Because teaching that evolution is wrong is lying and "making things up", no matter how much you want to believe otherwise. Teaching kids to see both sides of an issue is all fine and good, but teaching them that anti-intellectual dogma deserves to be placed on the same plane as established scientific fact is not, and the reason this is so important is because children don't have the innate ability to tell the difference- that's why we have education in the first place.
Revolt and go where? The other ad-free open-access Internet encyclopedia? There really aren't any alternatives to Wikipedia right now, so no matter how mad the purists would be there's nowhere for them to go.
does it make sense to spend $100 million over 5 years securing your environment properly to avoid a virus that may or may not cost you anywhere near that much, when there's a possibility that something could _still_ infect your intranet?
It all depends on the situation and the cost-benefit. If that intranet is backing your country's nuclear weap^H^H^H^H energy program- which almost every nation on earth has condemned, and at least one has expressed the desire to bomb to ashes- then yeah, it might. Dunder-Mifflin Paper's Scranton office and a state nuclear development apparatus probably have different security requirements, let's leave it at that.
I haven't seen anything that I've said "Yes, the public needed to know this, it is important and shouldn't have been secret."
Here'ssomethingyou might be interested in then: US-based PMC pimps out underage Afghan boys to local law enforcement officials. Your tax dollars at work! I can provide other examples on request.
I actually agree with you when you say that if the sensitive documents have nothing of value to the public in terms of exposing illegal activity, then it's best for diplomacy if they remain classified. But that is most definitely not the case here.
The other day, Lieberman (who is looooong past his expiration date as a politician. Let's get with the program, Connecticut) was mouthing off on Fox News about how the New York Times should be investigated for espionage for cooperating with Wikileaks and publishing the cables. It's like, has he really never heard of New York Times v United States? This wasn't that long ago, and it was the same newspaper to boot. And apart from the really right-wing Neocon wingnuts, find me a person today who doesn't think the leak of the Pentagon Papers was ultimately for the best. Why should Wikileaks be any different?
I'm sure the Slashdot community will be more than happy to loudly tell Mr. McNealy exactly why he's wrong. Just don't forget who the CEO- with total knowledge of the company's inner workings and financial statements- is, and who the people trolling from their basement with no business/management experience whatsoever are.
Based on App Store and Marketpace sales, I think people are itching to have a phone that doubles as a gaming device, but there's nothing that scratches that itch perfectly yet. The iPhone doesn't do the trick because it has no physical controls (touch- and accelerometer-based games are great for some genres, but lousy for many others), and Android's game library is still pretty lame.
Of course, if anyone can screw this up, it's Sony. Their recent track record with both phones (Ericsson, ick) and portable gaming (PSPGo, double ick) is not great, so trying to do both at once could be a big bag of fail.
On top of what you said, even though I support Wikileaks' release of the cables, the State Department's rationale makes perfect sense to me: if you go posting these (still considered classified) documents all over your friends' walls, what does that say about your ability to handle classified information? Even if you don't believe in the State Department's right to keep secrets- and again, I'm not saying I do- from their point of view they do, and so for them to hire someone demonstrating a casual disregard for data secrecy would just be stupid.
In other words, no, it's not the Thought Police, it's responsible hiring. Stand down from Red Alert, Number One.
The political right hates China because they see them as a threat to American national security interests, so Slashdot posts a story about "OMG they accessed all our traffic for 18 minutes, they're trying to get intelligence secrets". The left hates China because of their disgusting intolerance of any human rights, so Slashdot posts a story about someone being jailed for a Twitter post. See, fair and balanced! Who says this is a left-leaning website?
But see, that's the beauty of corporate accounting. They never actually lie, it's all a matter of classifying revenue sources and sinks in brain-twisting ways that are technically accurate, even though from a bird's-eye view they give a completely mistaken impression of what's going on.
And this isn't consigned to Microsoft, like an above commenter said, every Fortune 500 company has done it to varying extents. It's difficult to make illegal, too, because there's no one technique used (seems to be as much an art as it is a science, finding loopholes that aren't closed); so it's impossible to write a law that's general enough to stop the practice yet still enforceable.
In the absence of regulation, free markets always end up as monopolies. Not sometimes but always.
Wu argues that this is nothing new, and that each wave of information technology has followed the same pattern
It's not just information technology, it's technology in general since 1840. Textiles, railroads, oil, PC operating systems - they all started out as highly competitive markets then inevitably became monopolies, until the government stepped in. Why should the Internet be any different?
that Americans... actually love monopolies?
No, it's just that most of us are too stupid to realize this tendency, no matter how many times it's been demonstrated in the past. Show an American government regulation, even if it's to protect him, and he'll start shrieking about communism before you can get a word in edgewise.
It is more effective. The judge's ruling was based on the idea that an "ordinary person" would not recognize the joke, take it seriously, and be terrified. The point of this campaign is to demonstrate that that's nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps someone caught up in the spirit of World Backup Day would be kind enough to offer me some advice?
I've got a Mac, but it triple-boots OS X, Windows 7, and Ubuntu 10.04, through a combination of rEFI, grub, and an unhealthy GPT-MBR hybrid partition scheme. Is there any single tool that I can use to back up my whole disk? I'd like to not run individual backup solutions on each operating system, but at the same time, I'd like to backup on a per-file basis, instead of just cloning the whole disk every week or whatever. Is there any single tool out there that will do this, if I were to mount the other two OS partitions in the third?
The issue is that without the essential freedoms to study, modify and distribute copies of the software, users are at a disadvantage to the developer and that's unjust.
Before parroting boilerplate lines, could you please make an effort to understand the context of what people are talking about? Your quote is great for talking about Matlab or something; here, it makes no sense.
You can already "study" Google's Javascript code: like you said, you can look at it. You can already "modify" Google's Javascript code, just like you can modify any other Javascript code. Try it sometime: type "javascript:foo();" into your browser and watch the magic happen. Nothing is stopping you from disabling Google's Javascript altogether and setting your own scripts to run every time you open mail.google.com. You could even share your custom Javascript with other people if they want to use it: behold, you're distributing copies. What rights, exactly, are you arguing for? And what are you talking about, "disadvantage to the developer"? You can see exactly what the Javascript does, and you can disable or modify some or all of it at your whim.
How much would this have cost before the Kinect came out?
A lot. Please see an earlier comment I made on the exact same issue: prior to the launch of the Kinect, if you wanted an accurate depth map on a robot, you had to use LIDAR sensors. Not only are those expensive, but they're both heavy and somewhat unreliable (since they have moving parts in the form of rapidly spinning mirrors) which rules out mounting them on a copter. There are ways to estimate depth from 2D images alone, but then accuracy suffers immensely. With Kinect you get the best of both worlds.
Happy Rejected-from-MIT Day!
If you had, y'know, read the article (or even the summary) you would've seen them point out that the issue is not whether John Q. Driver can get from place to place, but how there are a lot of invisible applications, like synchronizing the US power grid, that have grown to rely on GPS. Those are the things that are in danger from intentional or unintentional jamming, no one cares about navigation.
The worst part about this is that the solution is not as easy as this article makes it out to be. GPS signals have to be as weak as they are by design- you just can't get much more transmitting power into those satellites, and while LORAN might help, I don't think it has the accuracy either in positioning or in timing that a lot of applications need. It does highlight the necessity for these devices to "fail gracefully" instead of catastrophically though.
That's a good way to automatically lose your case and get the steepest possible punishment. Judges hate, hate people who destroy relevant evidence, and even if you securely erase the data itself, forensics teams can often tell that you erased something in the first place (and if he did that, Hotz would have to explain why he didn't have any data relating to this project he spend so much time on). I'm sure it's possible to erase things in such a fashion as to avoid leaving evidence that I ever performed an erasure, but I sure wouldn't want to chance it in his situation, especially when it doesn't look like Sony has an especially strong case.
If you're not a high-priority target or planning on creating civil unrest, than this restrictive government doesn't care about you. If you are, then encryption isn't going to save you. They'll either pull off some side-channel attack, like a rootkit on your phone that no amount of encryption is going to subvert, or just throw you in jail for using encryption at all.
I'm all for security, but a lot of Slashdotters really need a sense of perspective.
It's revolutionary because prior to the launch of the Kinect, if you wanted both visual input and a depth map on a robot, you had to spend hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars on LIDAR sensors, which are fussy pieces of equipment at the best of times. Within its design range, Kinect is as accurate as any LIDAR sensor, much more reliable, and waaaaay cheaper. For this reason, a lot of robot designers don't bother with LIDAR, which means you have to estimate distance and range with GPS, direct image data, or a host of other not-quite-as-accurate means. Not to mention it handles skeletal tracking, gesture recognition and other unpleasant programming tasks itself, leaving the robot designer free to do other things.
Kinect really has kind of changed the game overnight. People are very excited about being able to equip accurate depth sensors on all kinds of robots that they wouldn't have bothered with before. Even if no "new" innovations were to ever appear from Kinect, the increase in accuracy of old standbys like manipulator arms will be tremendous now that they can have depth maps. I'm at Cornell at the moment, and many of the grad students in robotics already have Kinect-based projects well underway, and even in the undergrad robot learning classes (where you typically do one semester-long project) the professor is pushing Kinect as an option.
Hate to put a damper on things, but the only reason this failed was that the Republicans assumed that passage was a fait accompli, so they pushed it in under an expediting procedure that requires a two-thirds vote, and the bill only failed that by 7 votes. All they have to do is reintroduce it under the usual majority vote rule and it will be a done deal.
Though I will admit, for the first time since I became aware of their existence I feel something other than blinding hatred for the Tea Party, who are basically responsible for the Republicans not having enough votes. Looks like some of them really do care about civil liberties, and for that at least they should be congratulated.
Save your praise: most of the Republicans actually supported extension. It only failed by seven votes, and that because almost every Democrat and some of the Tea Party newcomers opposed it.
Because teaching that evolution is wrong is lying and "making things up", no matter how much you want to believe otherwise. Teaching kids to see both sides of an issue is all fine and good, but teaching them that anti-intellectual dogma deserves to be placed on the same plane as established scientific fact is not, and the reason this is so important is because children don't have the innate ability to tell the difference- that's why we have education in the first place.
Revolt and go where? The other ad-free open-access Internet encyclopedia? There really aren't any alternatives to Wikipedia right now, so no matter how mad the purists would be there's nowhere for them to go.
"4, Insightful" instead of "Funny", eh? Must be a lot of grad students with mod points today.
does it make sense to spend $100 million over 5 years securing your environment properly to avoid a virus that may or may not cost you anywhere near that much, when there's a possibility that something could _still_ infect your intranet?
It all depends on the situation and the cost-benefit. If that intranet is backing your country's nuclear weap^H^H^H^H energy program- which almost every nation on earth has condemned, and at least one has expressed the desire to bomb to ashes- then yeah, it might. Dunder-Mifflin Paper's Scranton office and a state nuclear development apparatus probably have different security requirements, let's leave it at that.
I haven't seen anything that I've said "Yes, the public needed to know this, it is important and shouldn't have been secret."
Here'ssomethingyou might be interested in then: US-based PMC pimps out underage Afghan boys to local law enforcement officials. Your tax dollars at work! I can provide other examples on request.
I actually agree with you when you say that if the sensitive documents have nothing of value to the public in terms of exposing illegal activity, then it's best for diplomacy if they remain classified. But that is most definitely not the case here.
The other day, Lieberman (who is looooong past his expiration date as a politician. Let's get with the program, Connecticut) was mouthing off on Fox News about how the New York Times should be investigated for espionage for cooperating with Wikileaks and publishing the cables. It's like, has he really never heard of New York Times v United States ? This wasn't that long ago, and it was the same newspaper to boot. And apart from the really right-wing Neocon wingnuts, find me a person today who doesn't think the leak of the Pentagon Papers was ultimately for the best. Why should Wikileaks be any different?
I'm sure the Slashdot community will be more than happy to loudly tell Mr. McNealy exactly why he's wrong. Just don't forget who the CEO- with total knowledge of the company's inner workings and financial statements- is, and who the people trolling from their basement with no business/management experience whatsoever are.
Based on App Store and Marketpace sales, I think people are itching to have a phone that doubles as a gaming device, but there's nothing that scratches that itch perfectly yet. The iPhone doesn't do the trick because it has no physical controls (touch- and accelerometer-based games are great for some genres, but lousy for many others), and Android's game library is still pretty lame.
Of course, if anyone can screw this up, it's Sony. Their recent track record with both phones (Ericsson, ick) and portable gaming (PSPGo, double ick) is not great, so trying to do both at once could be a big bag of fail.
Still, I'll be paying close attention.
What the hell, I have karma to burn.
On top of what you said, even though I support Wikileaks' release of the cables, the State Department's rationale makes perfect sense to me: if you go posting these (still considered classified) documents all over your friends' walls, what does that say about your ability to handle classified information? Even if you don't believe in the State Department's right to keep secrets- and again, I'm not saying I do- from their point of view they do, and so for them to hire someone demonstrating a casual disregard for data secrecy would just be stupid.
In other words, no, it's not the Thought Police, it's responsible hiring. Stand down from Red Alert, Number One.
Cool
Icy what you did there.
The political right hates China because they see them as a threat to American national security interests, so Slashdot posts a story about "OMG they accessed all our traffic for 18 minutes, they're trying to get intelligence secrets". The left hates China because of their disgusting intolerance of any human rights, so Slashdot posts a story about someone being jailed for a Twitter post. See, fair and balanced! Who says this is a left-leaning website?
But see, that's the beauty of corporate accounting. They never actually lie, it's all a matter of classifying revenue sources and sinks in brain-twisting ways that are technically accurate, even though from a bird's-eye view they give a completely mistaken impression of what's going on.
And this isn't consigned to Microsoft, like an above commenter said, every Fortune 500 company has done it to varying extents. It's difficult to make illegal, too, because there's no one technique used (seems to be as much an art as it is a science, finding loopholes that aren't closed); so it's impossible to write a law that's general enough to stop the practice yet still enforceable.
Wu argues that this is nothing new, and that each wave of information technology has followed the same pattern
It's not just information technology, it's technology in general since 1840. Textiles, railroads, oil, PC operating systems - they all started out as highly competitive markets then inevitably became monopolies, until the government stepped in. Why should the Internet be any different?
that Americans... actually love monopolies?
No, it's just that most of us are too stupid to realize this tendency, no matter how many times it's been demonstrated in the past. Show an American government regulation, even if it's to protect him, and he'll start shrieking about communism before you can get a word in edgewise.
It is more effective. The judge's ruling was based on the idea that an "ordinary person" would not recognize the joke, take it seriously, and be terrified. The point of this campaign is to demonstrate that that's nonsense.
Don't bother clicking the Anonymous button, Taco. We know it's you.