A Project Gutenberg text is one thing. An AmiWord file from 1991 is not. If you think those files will be important in the next 30 years, you'd better convert them when you migrate off the Amiga platform because you'll probably no longer own an Amiga capable of running AmiWord in 2021, nor will you own a 3.5" floppy drive that can read GCR encoded sectors. (I don't even own a working 3.5" floppy drive any more.) Dealing with the potential expiration of media is one of the "burdens."
For example, my wife recently asked me for a copy of our association's documents of incorporation, but the original digital files remain only on 3.5" Amiga diskettes. If I wanted them to be digital once again, I'd have to scan and/or retype the dot-matrix-printed paper copies we filed with the state. I'm not paying that burden, so she got paper copies and faxed them to the requester.
For another recent version of this problem, what do most people do with their collection of 99 cent iTunes AAC encrypted files when they migrate to a non-Apple device? My 15-year-old niece figured out she could burn them all to CDs, then rip them to her new phone, so she spent hours burning a stack of CD-Rs. There's a burden.
In 20 years do you know if your USB memory sticks will still be readable? What about your CD-Rs and other optical media? Do you know for sure that the dyes used in their manufacture will last 20 years? Did you store them all in adequately cool, dark places? Will you still have a working spinny-disc reader, or will we all be using holographic memory crystals slotted into our skulls, laughing at the good old days of USB-3 and "external PCs", and staring at boxes of completely-unusable shiny discs?
And if the answer is "I stuck all 1000 CDs in my machine and made local copies of each disk image", then you've already paid the burden.
I wouldn't call it "Media-luddite." Owning the storage required to retain a copy of every bit you ever download is probably within the financial grasp of plenty of Slashdot readers. That's not the problem.
The problem is in the *need* to retain it. Every byte you own contributes to a "technical debt" for yourself. You might have home movies stored in whatever format Kodak was transcribing things in the 1990s. You might have Flash presentations from 2001. You might have the data files from a tax return you filed on your Apple back in the 1980s. But is this data usable? Do you still have a working copy of VisiCalc? When you migrated from the IBM PC-AT, did you migrate the contents of all your 1/4" QIC tapes? Do you still have those Commodore 64 5-1/4" floppies?
If the answer is "I still have those tapes and discs, it would be stupid to throw them away", do you know if they are readable? Does the tape machine still work? Did the adhesive binding the magnetic particles to the mylar substrate degrade over time? Do you have drivers for the old tape machine for your current OS? Do you still have a working Commodore 64 and working disk drive? If you don't run and migrate every one of those tapes right now, you're acknowledging that at least some of that old data is no longer valuable.
My guess is that at some point you realized you were able to abandon the old, now useless data, and successfully moved on with your life. So do the other commenters. They're simply pointing out that by making those decisions today, you don't have to drag those 20-year-old unusable files forward.
And please don't get me wrong, because I'm more like you than I am them: I still have a copy of my previous machine's hard drive on my current machine. Inside that is a copy of the machine's disk before that, and inside it a copy of the machine before that. My hard drive is like a set of Russian nesting dolls. And every so often, I'll go back one, two, or even three disk images ago and recover something cool from the past, but the vast majority of those past things are utterly useless these days. The most valuable artifacts I still have are digitized photographs of my infant son, which from that era are 320x240 GIF images - smaller than a Windows 7 icon! But really, my life would be just fine even if I didn't have that ability. The benefits of having the data are not worth much. The reason I keep it is that the cost of sorting out the useful from the useless is higher than just copying it all.
The technical term for the whole process run by the rich to sway decision-makers is "astroturfing," because they're creating an artificial grass-roots effort. Sock puppetry is only one tool in their toolbox.
Nicky Hager's book Secrets and Lies, has terrific detail on how such a campaign is run, documenting the New Zealand timber industry's bought-and-paid-for efforts to run roughshod over the environmentalists in order to log the islands.
Bluetooth has been steadily crippled by phone provider after phone provider. A Sony Ericsson from 8 years ago could do OBEX, could import a menu and remotely control a device, and could browse file systems on remote devices. But then greed happened to the U.S. carriers. Verizon was afraid that if you could send a photo via Bluetooth, you wouldn't spend $0.45 to MMS it. (At least AT&T never sank to that level.) Motorola continually reduced support for OBEX. The iPhone, which never even bother with OBEX, had its Bluetooth crippled deliberately by Apple because they wanted to license their $3 iPhone-docking-station-remote-control chips to docking station makers, and didn't want them to bypass their overpriced chip by controlling the music via Bluetooth. Thus cool toys like AD2P headphones were rendered almost useless, because the next track/previous track buttons wouldn't work.
AD2P headphones turned out to be useless for home theater, as well. The delay in digitizing the audio renders it audibly out of sync with the video stream.
Interoperability having an impact on stability has been a continual problem I've had with Bluetooth. I have yet to own a phone whose Bluetooth doesn't cause it to crash on a fairly frequent basis. My iPhone is stable if all I do remotely is simple phone control, but I ended up disabling A2DP because it locked up about once a week when I used it daily in my car. I'm pretty sure it is triggered by the stereo simply stopping the transmission mid-stream when the ignition is cut (nice design, Kenwood) and the iPhone not recovering (what, error handling? Not in our fine iProduct!)
And it's too bad, because I really wanted Bluetooth to bring all my devices together automatically. The promise was there, but too many companies with too many vested interests had to get in there and crap it all up.
The great majority of corporations are small businesses, I don't think there are as many puppies as you think there are.
Small businesses are certainly no magical proof of ethical behavior. I know just some of what's going on at the place where my wife works, and it's certainly a factor in why she's turned in her notice. Hell, if eating puppies would turn a profit, I think he'd hire a chef.
It's easy to be "nice" when you're vastly rich. But nobody with a valid claim to good judgement should EVER forget where all that wealth and power came from. Or the amount that a just accounting leaves them owing to the people they screwed over. Or, crucially, how much those assets would have created if they hadn't been in the hands of a slimebucket. If you mug me and steal my wallet when I'm on the way to pay my rent, you're not "a nice guy" for then giving me a few bucks months later to help me pay the late fees accrued from not having had that money in the first place.
Do you question the ethics of the authors of the open source code you use? Was your browser written by a bigot? Was your editor maintained by a homophobe, or a thief, an atheist, a baptist, a mugger, or a communist? Was your file system written by a murderer?*
It's easy to be "mean" when you can ignore the provenance of a gift, and conveniently never pass judgment on where that code came from.
* To be honest, this is the only actual claim of these I know to have a factual basis. I pretty much have no idea which open source developers or products are written by people I would agree with or not, nor do I much care. Hell, I read Slashdot all the time knowing Pudge contributed a ton of the code, yet he's a person whose political views I find selfish and loathsome because he supports a different set of thieves in a different Washington.
It's like what happens when a figure skater moves their arms closer to their body. Their mass has shifted and they don't wobble but they do spin faster.
Since the earth didn't actually gain any new mass, I assume it had been slowing down as subduction shifted the crust in the build-up to the quake. Correct? Or did the shape of the globe change such that the north and south poles are now a tiny bit further apart, while the circumference at the equator shrank?
What would "enough results" be? Ten planes blown up? Five schools? Three office towers? That way next year we could try for only eight planes blown up, three schools, and one office tower. Gotta show "enough results", after all.
I'd say that whatever powers they're abusing, the results are that they've not let a lot happen.
The better question is: if they didn't have these abusive powers and massive budgets, what would their score be? Fifty blown up planes? Ten? Zero? We don't know, because those figures aren't made public. They are, however, shared with the politicians we elected, and whatever figures they are presenting are are compelling enough to get us to waste billions on proven useless and stupid ideas like backscatter scanners and virtual fences. And that's where I really get pissed off. The blown-up plane rate has been exactly zero since 9/11. Whatever they were doing for the previous nine years, they were doing without the half-billion dollars worth of backscatter machines, and it was quite obviously 100% effective.
So what I really want to know is which of my chickenshit representatives are wasting my tax dollars on these useless pieces of shit, and how to get them the hell out of office, because with those votes the only possible rational explanation is corruption. Under Bush, the only legislation that wasn't pure corruption was pure ignorance, and Obama has carried that time-honored tradition forwards in the finest spirit of fear-mongering and palm-greasing Washington has ever seen. The Paultards frighten me with their right-wing Christian equal-hatred-for-all-but-straight-white-people bullshit, and the Tea-baggers are nothing but the wholly-owned highly paid shills of Faux News Inc. And the useless Left couldn't wipe their own asses without forming a tax-gathering ass-finding commission, and then they'd filibuster themselves until they were ankle deep in shit anyway.
There isn't a single person in a Federal office that I want to be there any more. Not even the Supreme Court has my respect any more, not after granting corporations "free speech through election-buying". One-term-only term limits are sounding pretty damn good to me right now.
Managing programmers is a difficult job. There's not a lot of glory in it, it's not well understood, and it can often be very stressful. It's not anyone's dream job..
I know some people who would disagree with you. They absolutely love being managers, they enjoy mentoring people to become leaders, they like the challenge. And managing programmers is a completely different challenge than managing burger flippers. The motivations are different, the challenges are different, the options are different, and the rewards greater. For the person who likes that role, and has a talent for it, yes, it's a good job.
From one point of view, it is isolated. The car is not connected to any other devices.
From another, the components are not isolated from each other for all kinds of reasons. The CAN bus hosts all kinds of things that might care about each other. Door locks talk to lighting systems. The tire pressure sensors talk to the dashboard. The speedometer talks to the stability controls. The stability controls tie into the braking systems. The stereo shuts off when the doors open. The stereo could even increase audio volume as speed goes up to kind of "Dolby over" the vehicle's noise. Crash detection ties in the sensors, engine, signals and lighting, braking, passenger restraints, and even tells the audio system to call 911 on the owner's Bluetooth phone, using the navigation system to tell the operator where the accident occurred.
Just about anything in a car might have a legitimate reason to communicate to another in certain situations: some for convenience, some for comfort, some for safety. And safety comes in various flavors: accident avoidance through traction control and suspension systems, crash response systems, and vehicle security (door locks) . Do you compromise one aspect of safety (crash response) by isolating some components you deem "more critical", such as anti-lock brakes? And in response to which threats? Is vehicle security really more important than crash response?
We're dealing with unknowns and supposed threats with the hacking described in TFA. So far, no hacker has caused a car's left side brakes to lock up at 80 MPH, causing the vehicle to spin and crash. But we know the number of air-bags that go off daily, we know the survival rates for various kinds of crashes have gone down, and we know how many deaths those systems have prevented.
What TFA provides is a really strong argument that security needs to be placed on every input. Just like web design, auto software engineers have to take nothing for granted, and have to distrust everything from MP3 files to tire pressure sensors.
I live in Minnesota, which is in the northern continental U.S at 45 degrees north. When I was younger I had a factory job that ran from 7:00 to 17:00 Monday through Friday, and 7:00 to 12:00 on Saturdays. The shop had no windows or natural light except for a few small, north-facing windows in the truck dock and office areas. It was not a great neighborhood, and windows invited burglars and vandals. The interior lighting was provided by lines of bare fluorescent bulbs that were significantly dimmed by layers of grime sprayed continually by the machinery. One of the occasional tasks to do when it was slow was to mop the light bulbs with a rag on a stick. The lunchroom was interior and also had no windows. There was enough light to work by, but not much more.
In December and January, we would arrive at work before dawn, and leave after dusk. On Saturdays, we would leave the cave-like darkness at high noon, and on those clear winter days I often felt like a vampire being exposed to the sunlight.
It seems that daylight savings time was geared expressly towards making a job like mine slightly more tolerable. The only problem is it never helped me when I could have used it. I didn't need "more daylight" in the summer hours, I needed to have more daylight opportunities in the winter!
All in all, Daylight Savings Time means almost nothing to me except inconvenience.
A 10. address could point to a real machine inside a corporate network, which could be bad if the idiot tried it at work. Instead, I wish they'd show the guy "hacking" his way into 127.0.0.1, then doing something like "C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\>DEL *.*" It would be totally excellent to hear the fallout of that.
Oh. My. God. That was the most painful scene ever. "Search Usenet for 'JOB'. Search string not found." WHAT THE FSCK!!!?? People were posting jobs to usenet before Cantor and Siegel!
The only redeeming quality was that as he was scrolling through the news groups, I think he went past either alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk or alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork But otherwise that stupid scene just left me howling in pain!
In some CSI type show I was watching the other day, they were able to "enhance" the footage from a security camera in order to "widen the field of view" and see someone "off camera".
I have to think writers just chuckle to themselves when they add something so silly.
Then you may be surprised to learn that there are security cameras that actually work that way, and are available now. You can buy a camera with a 180 degree fisheye lens and high resolution sensor that records everything within sight, and then run software that lets the user virtually pan and tilt in every direction, straightening the image so that it looks like it was shot by a normal security camera. I'm not saying that the CSI camera was one of these, but they do exist. Mobotix makes one that looks like a smoke detector.
In some situations the "enhance" that lets them "zoom in" on a face is also reality. If there is motion in the scene, such as you might get with a panning view of a scene or with a moving subject, the differences between frames holds extra information. There is frame stacking software available that can interpolate the edges between pixels. (Thierry Legault used this technology to produce some amazing images of the shuttle Discovery with a ground-based telescope, as reported on/. a few days ago http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/STS-133.html.) By measuring the shift in values as those real edges approach the edge of a pixel, the software can extract enough information to figure out where the real edges are. You can kind of think of it as "ClearType in reverse" or "anti-aliasing in reverse". But of course this technique only works in certain circumstances, when the subject is moving in a fashion that is cooperative with the technology and resolution of the camera. Six frames of the back of a fleeing suspect's head is still not going to let you zoom in on the zit under his nose.
And these techniques are in use by video forensics analysts today. The lab guys I know may not be quite as sexy as the ones on TV, but they get results that yield convictions by making some pretty poor video useful in a courtroom. And I know the operators of these systems chuckle when their equipment helps bring down another bad guy.
You can't recast the Tea Party's agenda any more than I can. It's set by Rupert Murdoch and the Faux News crew, at the behest of billionaires like the Koch brothers. They pay top dollar to keep that network broadcasting their message to cut taxes, and the only input they accept from the non-billionaire club is the crap about the right-wing social agenda. Want to complain about abortion or gays? Go ahead. Want to complain about drugs? Sure, whatever. Moslems? Yeah, profile them in airports if you want. Black people? *cough*. Patriotism? Hey, as long as you're buying more ammo and more jets, wave them flags! Want to complain about the economy? Well, umm -- DEATH PANELS! PRIVATIZE SOCIAL SECURITY! NO NEW TAXES! LIBERAL AGENDA!
Seriously, the Faux News network is the Billionaire's PAC, and it's a hell of a lot easier to own a TV network than it is to launder that much in political donations.
What happened then was people figured out how to get 160 points without doing X, and with enough hackery, figure out the algorithm behind it.
According to TFA it doesn't appear that they ever figured out the algorithm. They just figured out how to get 160 points by refreshing web page X, and then repeated until they had a lot of points.
As usual the/. headline is sufficiently lacking in factual basis. The "hackers" figured out a URL, not an algorithm.
Huh? When I was 12, I was programming in assembler.
Huh? When I was 11 I was bitbanging RS-232 at 300bps using a telegraph straight key. Got to the point where I could emulate a TTY well enough that I could launch vi and edit a file. We won't go into my privilege escalation exploits... ah, misspent youth.
Luxury. When I was 11 we used to dream of 300bps. We had to whistle FSK sounds directly into the 110bps modem, and if we failed two sign-ons in a row our teachers would thrash us with their belts.
Great - what the internet needs is more regulation.
Thanks EU.
I think that's exactly what America needs: more EU regulation. We'll just host their sites over here, because we don't have to comply with their stupid laws.
Sorry, but no. GPS is a set of perfectly synchronized clocks attached to radio transmitters, and they are continually broadcasting their time and location - not yours. If you listen to one transmitter, it's telling you exactly what time it is. If you are smart enough to listen to four of them at once, and measure the time delay differences between their signals, then you get the added bonus of being able to figure out where your receiving antenna is.
Sure, most people think the benefit is knowing where they are. But that doesn't invalidate their primary mode of operation, which is that of a very, very accurate clock.
Even with security in mind, ATMs are still built cheaply, and sold by the lowest bidders. Let's say that some GPS-jamming-related losses could be prevented by including a fifty dollar module to provide backup location services. If they can save money by excluding the module, that could mean an extra ten million dollars in profits from that model. But what impact does the module really have? The cost of unavailability is something like the projected lost revenue divided by the percentage of time that GPS is down, which is primarily only when idiots with illegal GPS jammers are abusing them. If that's less than ten million dollars saved, the fifty dollar module isn't worth it.
But it leads down another cheaper route. Let's say you could add a GPS-jammer-detector circuit for one dollar. You could use that to generate security events that are precursors to actual abuses, possibly enabling early response by security forces. As a bonus they yield direct evidence of a felony, because you can ask the police to haul a guy away for five years just for using a GPS jammer, even if you can't prove he was going to rob your ATM. Again, the payback depends on how many GPS-jamming criminals there are out there, but the cost difference might mean you only need two criminal convictions to make it worth it.
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A Project Gutenberg text is one thing. An AmiWord file from 1991 is not. If you think those files will be important in the next 30 years, you'd better convert them when you migrate off the Amiga platform because you'll probably no longer own an Amiga capable of running AmiWord in 2021, nor will you own a 3.5" floppy drive that can read GCR encoded sectors. (I don't even own a working 3.5" floppy drive any more.) Dealing with the potential expiration of media is one of the "burdens."
For example, my wife recently asked me for a copy of our association's documents of incorporation, but the original digital files remain only on 3.5" Amiga diskettes. If I wanted them to be digital once again, I'd have to scan and/or retype the dot-matrix-printed paper copies we filed with the state. I'm not paying that burden, so she got paper copies and faxed them to the requester.
For another recent version of this problem, what do most people do with their collection of 99 cent iTunes AAC encrypted files when they migrate to a non-Apple device? My 15-year-old niece figured out she could burn them all to CDs, then rip them to her new phone, so she spent hours burning a stack of CD-Rs. There's a burden.
In 20 years do you know if your USB memory sticks will still be readable? What about your CD-Rs and other optical media? Do you know for sure that the dyes used in their manufacture will last 20 years? Did you store them all in adequately cool, dark places? Will you still have a working spinny-disc reader, or will we all be using holographic memory crystals slotted into our skulls, laughing at the good old days of USB-3 and "external PCs", and staring at boxes of completely-unusable shiny discs?
And if the answer is "I stuck all 1000 CDs in my machine and made local copies of each disk image", then you've already paid the burden.
I, for one, welcome our Wesley Willis towering overlord.
What you towerin' over, Willis?
Oh. Chicago. I get it.
I wouldn't call it "Media-luddite." Owning the storage required to retain a copy of every bit you ever download is probably within the financial grasp of plenty of Slashdot readers. That's not the problem.
The problem is in the *need* to retain it. Every byte you own contributes to a "technical debt" for yourself. You might have home movies stored in whatever format Kodak was transcribing things in the 1990s. You might have Flash presentations from 2001. You might have the data files from a tax return you filed on your Apple back in the 1980s. But is this data usable? Do you still have a working copy of VisiCalc? When you migrated from the IBM PC-AT, did you migrate the contents of all your 1/4" QIC tapes? Do you still have those Commodore 64 5-1/4" floppies?
If the answer is "I still have those tapes and discs, it would be stupid to throw them away", do you know if they are readable? Does the tape machine still work? Did the adhesive binding the magnetic particles to the mylar substrate degrade over time? Do you have drivers for the old tape machine for your current OS? Do you still have a working Commodore 64 and working disk drive? If you don't run and migrate every one of those tapes right now, you're acknowledging that at least some of that old data is no longer valuable.
My guess is that at some point you realized you were able to abandon the old, now useless data, and successfully moved on with your life. So do the other commenters. They're simply pointing out that by making those decisions today, you don't have to drag those 20-year-old unusable files forward.
And please don't get me wrong, because I'm more like you than I am them: I still have a copy of my previous machine's hard drive on my current machine. Inside that is a copy of the machine's disk before that, and inside it a copy of the machine before that. My hard drive is like a set of Russian nesting dolls. And every so often, I'll go back one, two, or even three disk images ago and recover something cool from the past, but the vast majority of those past things are utterly useless these days. The most valuable artifacts I still have are digitized photographs of my infant son, which from that era are 320x240 GIF images - smaller than a Windows 7 icon! But really, my life would be just fine even if I didn't have that ability. The benefits of having the data are not worth much. The reason I keep it is that the cost of sorting out the useful from the useless is higher than just copying it all.
The technical term for the whole process run by the rich to sway decision-makers is "astroturfing," because they're creating an artificial grass-roots effort. Sock puppetry is only one tool in their toolbox.
Nicky Hager's book Secrets and Lies, has terrific detail on how such a campaign is run, documenting the New Zealand timber industry's bought-and-paid-for efforts to run roughshod over the environmentalists in order to log the islands.
I, for one, am one of your new sock puppet overlords.
Slashdot editors are really, really wearing out the tired, sensationalistic "Such and Such is Dead" headline.
Is the Business Card Dead?
The Death of BCC
Comics Code Dead
It's supposed to be dramatic and sensational but it's lazy and annoying; cut it out.
Besides, they never get Netcraft to confirm it anyway.
Bluetooth has been steadily crippled by phone provider after phone provider. A Sony Ericsson from 8 years ago could do OBEX, could import a menu and remotely control a device, and could browse file systems on remote devices. But then greed happened to the U.S. carriers. Verizon was afraid that if you could send a photo via Bluetooth, you wouldn't spend $0.45 to MMS it. (At least AT&T never sank to that level.) Motorola continually reduced support for OBEX. The iPhone, which never even bother with OBEX, had its Bluetooth crippled deliberately by Apple because they wanted to license their $3 iPhone-docking-station-remote-control chips to docking station makers, and didn't want them to bypass their overpriced chip by controlling the music via Bluetooth. Thus cool toys like AD2P headphones were rendered almost useless, because the next track/previous track buttons wouldn't work.
AD2P headphones turned out to be useless for home theater, as well. The delay in digitizing the audio renders it audibly out of sync with the video stream.
Interoperability having an impact on stability has been a continual problem I've had with Bluetooth. I have yet to own a phone whose Bluetooth doesn't cause it to crash on a fairly frequent basis. My iPhone is stable if all I do remotely is simple phone control, but I ended up disabling A2DP because it locked up about once a week when I used it daily in my car. I'm pretty sure it is triggered by the stereo simply stopping the transmission mid-stream when the ignition is cut (nice design, Kenwood) and the iPhone not recovering (what, error handling? Not in our fine iProduct!)
And it's too bad, because I really wanted Bluetooth to bring all my devices together automatically. The promise was there, but too many companies with too many vested interests had to get in there and crap it all up.
The great majority of corporations are small businesses, I don't think there are as many puppies as you think there are.
Small businesses are certainly no magical proof of ethical behavior. I know just some of what's going on at the place where my wife works, and it's certainly a factor in why she's turned in her notice. Hell, if eating puppies would turn a profit, I think he'd hire a chef.
It's easy to be "nice" when you're vastly rich. But nobody with a valid claim to good judgement should EVER forget where all that wealth and power came from. Or the amount that a just accounting leaves them owing to the people they screwed over. Or, crucially, how much those assets would have created if they hadn't been in the hands of a slimebucket. If you mug me and steal my wallet when I'm on the way to pay my rent, you're not "a nice guy" for then giving me a few bucks months later to help me pay the late fees accrued from not having had that money in the first place.
Do you question the ethics of the authors of the open source code you use? Was your browser written by a bigot? Was your editor maintained by a homophobe, or a thief, an atheist, a baptist, a mugger, or a communist? Was your file system written by a murderer?*
It's easy to be "mean" when you can ignore the provenance of a gift, and conveniently never pass judgment on where that code came from.
* To be honest, this is the only actual claim of these I know to have a factual basis. I pretty much have no idea which open source developers or products are written by people I would agree with or not, nor do I much care. Hell, I read Slashdot all the time knowing Pudge contributed a ton of the code, yet he's a person whose political views I find selfish and loathsome because he supports a different set of thieves in a different Washington.
It's like what happens when a figure skater moves their arms closer to their body. Their mass has shifted and they don't wobble but they do spin faster.
Since the earth didn't actually gain any new mass, I assume it had been slowing down as subduction shifted the crust in the build-up to the quake. Correct? Or did the shape of the globe change such that the north and south poles are now a tiny bit further apart, while the circumference at the equator shrank?
What would "enough results" be? Ten planes blown up? Five schools? Three office towers? That way next year we could try for only eight planes blown up, three schools, and one office tower. Gotta show "enough results", after all.
I'd say that whatever powers they're abusing, the results are that they've not let a lot happen.
The better question is: if they didn't have these abusive powers and massive budgets, what would their score be? Fifty blown up planes? Ten? Zero? We don't know, because those figures aren't made public. They are, however, shared with the politicians we elected, and whatever figures they are presenting are are compelling enough to get us to waste billions on proven useless and stupid ideas like backscatter scanners and virtual fences. And that's where I really get pissed off. The blown-up plane rate has been exactly zero since 9/11. Whatever they were doing for the previous nine years, they were doing without the half-billion dollars worth of backscatter machines, and it was quite obviously 100% effective.
So what I really want to know is which of my chickenshit representatives are wasting my tax dollars on these useless pieces of shit, and how to get them the hell out of office, because with those votes the only possible rational explanation is corruption. Under Bush, the only legislation that wasn't pure corruption was pure ignorance, and Obama has carried that time-honored tradition forwards in the finest spirit of fear-mongering and palm-greasing Washington has ever seen. The Paultards frighten me with their right-wing Christian equal-hatred-for-all-but-straight-white-people bullshit, and the Tea-baggers are nothing but the wholly-owned highly paid shills of Faux News Inc. And the useless Left couldn't wipe their own asses without forming a tax-gathering ass-finding commission, and then they'd filibuster themselves until they were ankle deep in shit anyway.
There isn't a single person in a Federal office that I want to be there any more. Not even the Supreme Court has my respect any more, not after granting corporations "free speech through election-buying". One-term-only term limits are sounding pretty damn good to me right now.
Managing programmers is a difficult job. There's not a lot of glory in it, it's not well understood, and it can often be very stressful. It's not anyone's dream job..
I know some people who would disagree with you. They absolutely love being managers, they enjoy mentoring people to become leaders, they like the challenge. And managing programmers is a completely different challenge than managing burger flippers. The motivations are different, the challenges are different, the options are different, and the rewards greater. For the person who likes that role, and has a talent for it, yes, it's a good job.
From one point of view, it is isolated. The car is not connected to any other devices.
From another, the components are not isolated from each other for all kinds of reasons. The CAN bus hosts all kinds of things that might care about each other. Door locks talk to lighting systems. The tire pressure sensors talk to the dashboard. The speedometer talks to the stability controls. The stability controls tie into the braking systems. The stereo shuts off when the doors open. The stereo could even increase audio volume as speed goes up to kind of "Dolby over" the vehicle's noise. Crash detection ties in the sensors, engine, signals and lighting, braking, passenger restraints, and even tells the audio system to call 911 on the owner's Bluetooth phone, using the navigation system to tell the operator where the accident occurred.
Just about anything in a car might have a legitimate reason to communicate to another in certain situations: some for convenience, some for comfort, some for safety. And safety comes in various flavors: accident avoidance through traction control and suspension systems, crash response systems, and vehicle security (door locks) . Do you compromise one aspect of safety (crash response) by isolating some components you deem "more critical", such as anti-lock brakes? And in response to which threats? Is vehicle security really more important than crash response?
We're dealing with unknowns and supposed threats with the hacking described in TFA. So far, no hacker has caused a car's left side brakes to lock up at 80 MPH, causing the vehicle to spin and crash. But we know the number of air-bags that go off daily, we know the survival rates for various kinds of crashes have gone down, and we know how many deaths those systems have prevented.
What TFA provides is a really strong argument that security needs to be placed on every input. Just like web design, auto software engineers have to take nothing for granted, and have to distrust everything from MP3 files to tire pressure sensors.
The last time DST was adjusted there were congressmen arguing it would be good for farmers...because the plants would get more sunlight...
[Hilarious citation desperately wanted!]
I live in Minnesota, which is in the northern continental U.S at 45 degrees north. When I was younger I had a factory job that ran from 7:00 to 17:00 Monday through Friday, and 7:00 to 12:00 on Saturdays. The shop had no windows or natural light except for a few small, north-facing windows in the truck dock and office areas. It was not a great neighborhood, and windows invited burglars and vandals. The interior lighting was provided by lines of bare fluorescent bulbs that were significantly dimmed by layers of grime sprayed continually by the machinery. One of the occasional tasks to do when it was slow was to mop the light bulbs with a rag on a stick. The lunchroom was interior and also had no windows. There was enough light to work by, but not much more.
In December and January, we would arrive at work before dawn, and leave after dusk. On Saturdays, we would leave the cave-like darkness at high noon, and on those clear winter days I often felt like a vampire being exposed to the sunlight.
It seems that daylight savings time was geared expressly towards making a job like mine slightly more tolerable. The only problem is it never helped me when I could have used it. I didn't need "more daylight" in the summer hours, I needed to have more daylight opportunities in the winter!
All in all, Daylight Savings Time means almost nothing to me except inconvenience.
A 10. address could point to a real machine inside a corporate network, which could be bad if the idiot tried it at work. Instead, I wish they'd show the guy "hacking" his way into 127.0.0.1, then doing something like "C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\>DEL *.*" It would be totally excellent to hear the fallout of that.
Oh. My. God. That was the most painful scene ever. "Search Usenet for 'JOB'. Search string not found." WHAT THE FSCK!!!?? People were posting jobs to usenet before Cantor and Siegel!
The only redeeming quality was that as he was scrolling through the news groups, I think he went past either alt.alien.vampire.flonk.flonk.flonk or alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork But otherwise that stupid scene just left me howling in pain!
In some CSI type show I was watching the other day, they were able to "enhance" the footage from a security camera in order to "widen the field of view" and see someone "off camera".
I have to think writers just chuckle to themselves when they add something so silly.
Then you may be surprised to learn that there are security cameras that actually work that way, and are available now. You can buy a camera with a 180 degree fisheye lens and high resolution sensor that records everything within sight, and then run software that lets the user virtually pan and tilt in every direction, straightening the image so that it looks like it was shot by a normal security camera. I'm not saying that the CSI camera was one of these, but they do exist. Mobotix makes one that looks like a smoke detector.
In some situations the "enhance" that lets them "zoom in" on a face is also reality. If there is motion in the scene, such as you might get with a panning view of a scene or with a moving subject, the differences between frames holds extra information. There is frame stacking software available that can interpolate the edges between pixels. (Thierry Legault used this technology to produce some amazing images of the shuttle Discovery with a ground-based telescope, as reported on /. a few days ago http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/STS-133.html .) By measuring the shift in values as those real edges approach the edge of a pixel, the software can extract enough information to figure out where the real edges are. You can kind of think of it as "ClearType in reverse" or "anti-aliasing in reverse". But of course this technique only works in certain circumstances, when the subject is moving in a fashion that is cooperative with the technology and resolution of the camera. Six frames of the back of a fleeing suspect's head is still not going to let you zoom in on the zit under his nose.
And these techniques are in use by video forensics analysts today. The lab guys I know may not be quite as sexy as the ones on TV, but they get results that yield convictions by making some pretty poor video useful in a courtroom. And I know the operators of these systems chuckle when their equipment helps bring down another bad guy.
Yeah, but Goldblum had never seen their computers and wouldn't have the foggiest damned clue how to infect their OS.
...But he was using an Apple; "It just works."
"Invade different"
You can't recast the Tea Party's agenda any more than I can. It's set by Rupert Murdoch and the Faux News crew, at the behest of billionaires like the Koch brothers. They pay top dollar to keep that network broadcasting their message to cut taxes, and the only input they accept from the non-billionaire club is the crap about the right-wing social agenda. Want to complain about abortion or gays? Go ahead. Want to complain about drugs? Sure, whatever. Moslems? Yeah, profile them in airports if you want. Black people? *cough*. Patriotism? Hey, as long as you're buying more ammo and more jets, wave them flags! Want to complain about the economy? Well, umm -- DEATH PANELS! PRIVATIZE SOCIAL SECURITY! NO NEW TAXES! LIBERAL AGENDA!
Seriously, the Faux News network is the Billionaire's PAC, and it's a hell of a lot easier to own a TV network than it is to launder that much in political donations.
What happened then was people figured out how to get 160 points without doing X, and with enough hackery, figure out the algorithm behind it.
According to TFA it doesn't appear that they ever figured out the algorithm. They just figured out how to get 160 points by refreshing web page X, and then repeated until they had a lot of points.
As usual the /. headline is sufficiently lacking in factual basis. The "hackers" figured out a URL, not an algorithm.
Huh? When I was 12, I was programming in assembler.
Huh? When I was 11 I was bitbanging RS-232 at 300bps using a telegraph straight key. Got to the point where I could emulate a TTY well enough that I could launch vi and edit a file. We won't go into my privilege escalation exploits... ah, misspent youth.
Luxury. When I was 11 we used to dream of 300bps. We had to whistle FSK sounds directly into the 110bps modem, and if we failed two sign-ons in a row our teachers would thrash us with their belts.
Great - what the internet needs is more regulation.
Thanks EU.
I think that's exactly what America needs: more EU regulation. We'll just host their sites over here, because we don't have to comply with their stupid laws.
Sorry, but no. GPS is a set of perfectly synchronized clocks attached to radio transmitters, and they are continually broadcasting their time and location - not yours. If you listen to one transmitter, it's telling you exactly what time it is. If you are smart enough to listen to four of them at once, and measure the time delay differences between their signals, then you get the added bonus of being able to figure out where your receiving antenna is.
Sure, most people think the benefit is knowing where they are. But that doesn't invalidate their primary mode of operation, which is that of a very, very accurate clock.
Even with security in mind, ATMs are still built cheaply, and sold by the lowest bidders. Let's say that some GPS-jamming-related losses could be prevented by including a fifty dollar module to provide backup location services. If they can save money by excluding the module, that could mean an extra ten million dollars in profits from that model. But what impact does the module really have? The cost of unavailability is something like the projected lost revenue divided by the percentage of time that GPS is down, which is primarily only when idiots with illegal GPS jammers are abusing them. If that's less than ten million dollars saved, the fifty dollar module isn't worth it.
But it leads down another cheaper route. Let's say you could add a GPS-jammer-detector circuit for one dollar. You could use that to generate security events that are precursors to actual abuses, possibly enabling early response by security forces. As a bonus they yield direct evidence of a felony, because you can ask the police to haul a guy away for five years just for using a GPS jammer, even if you can't prove he was going to rob your ATM. Again, the payback depends on how many GPS-jamming criminals there are out there, but the cost difference might mean you only need two criminal convictions to make it worth it.