Considering the current crop of 'cloud' providers, whether they be storage or applications, truly be trusted? Current trends suggest not.
When did trends suggest that? I must have been dead during the past decade when the trends suggested that cloud providers could ever be trusted.
Even that God guy has a terrible record for smiting people with droughts and so on, suggesting that he's never been the most reliable of cloud providers.
The concept of a post-apocalypse tribal society restoring mankinds' knowledge with femtocell lasers is hilarious.
Indeed. Which is probably why that's not the argument that they are making for developing this technology.
Being a heretic, I RTFA'd and found:
highly useful for organisations with big archives.
[... such as museums and national archives]
So, say you are responsible for your country's archive of census data. Obviously you have at least two remote duplicates. Now, in each remote data centre, do you maintain a bank of hard drives with their well-known characteristics of burning out every few years, or a considerably smaller number of these devices with their own (currently unquantified, but hopefully considerably longer) lifetime? Change discs every decade when you finish collating the next census.
What you need to do is to look at the lifetime figures for the reading (and writing) machines, and then calculate which is the more efficient option for your use case. If the lifetime figures aren't available (yet), then you and some of your sys-admin colleagues need to decide whether to take a punt, then put a budget proposal together. It's called "working through the problem". You might like to try it one day instead of shooting your AC mouth off.
FWIW... when I was working on fingerprint recognition algorithms we found that Asian women had very difficult fingers to scan (small, with tiny and tight ridges).
One from my history : oil production platform was having an add-on applied to it - a module that would compress produced gas and pump it down a newly installed pipeline for sale onshore, instead of being used for fuel and burned off. Project required some machinery that connected to the existing machinery on the platform, plus a steel jacket set on the seabed to support the new machinery.
Long story short : left hand design team built the support jacket on the assumption that sea level was figure X above seabed (a measure called "Lowest Astronomical Tides") ; right hand design team designed the surface equipment, pumps, etc on the assumption that things were so far above sea-level. But they used a measure of sea level called "Mean Sea Level".
Major fuck up ; things didn't fit ; lines that should have let liquids run back to the platform sloped the wrong way ; no room or weight to put pumps onto the lines. M.A.J.O.R. fuck up. Took months to bodge up a solution. People responsible either fired or promoted - I never found out which. Situation 'Normal' : All Fucked Up.
If Snowden had true NSA SPYING information, they'd just send an operative to drop him and anybody he talked to.
No they wouldn't because that would make him a martyr. It's best to let Snowden stay isolated and eventually he'll fade into obscurity.
Oh, he'll die, sure enough. Probably of some nasty sexually-transmitted disease and the pathologist won't notice the inoculation mark. They'll have to burn the body "for public safety".
Death won't be sufficient ; there will have to be humiliation too.
Not that it's anything that I'd need to worry about (we have IT people to worry about this sort of thing at work, and I don't do Windows at home), but how is this going to work when you don't have a network. No wifi (radio transmitters and explosives don't mix well), no cabled network that we're allowed to plug into, and of course the nearest mobile phone tower or landline is several hundred miles away at the coast. So, how then is the bloody thing going to get set up?
On the other hand, no worry about drive-by downloads, malicious websites etc. ASCII files come in on a memory stick ; PDFs leave the same way and go to the computers on the customer's network.
Scores since World War 2 : Canada 26 deaths in 11 events ; Europe 104 deaths in 19 events ; Oceania & South America 86 deaths in 17 events ; Africa 51 deaths in 2 events ; America has 253 deaths in 127 events ( only going back as far as the 1980s, because the data isn't conveniently laid out and I can't be bothered going back any further).
Looks like all those armed vigilantes are being really effective. Every thing in America is so much bigger and better than here in the dowdy outside world. (This is "sarcasm", in case you haven't heard of it.)
We can last longer in bed because we're less sensitive, erm, down there.
How do you know? The only person I know who was circumcised as an aware person (rather than an infant) was done before he lost his virginity, so he had no opportunity to compare the two circumstances. I suppose it is possible that there are people who've got the appropriate experience, but I've never (knowingly) met one.
Some cultures mutilate girl's genitals in order to... make them... uhh, I am not sure why, but they do it.
The logic, according to a castrated hooker I was fucking one time in Abu Dhabi, is that by ensuring that the woman doesn't have most of the equipment necessary to enjoy having sex, then she's unlikely to actually go out and want to have sex with anyone, including people who aren't her husband. She'd been done when she was 8, by her mother and aunt. She got more pleasure from being fucked anally than vaginally.
Just because it's a horrible mutilation doesn't mean the the people doing it are insensitive, unthinking or illogical. They just have different opinions to you about the value of women.
There is a joke about the Arabs which is popular in the oilfield stating that "a boy for pleasure, a woman for children and a goat for warmth" ; while it's an oversimplification, there is certainly a basis in truth. The charges at the brothels tell you what the relative values are - compliant (young) men cost more than women of any age ; "swept" or "unswept" doesn't make a difference (the prostitute's opinion on the transaction isn't considered important).
keep the world addicted to resource-guzzling gluttony and block any moves to more sustainable (i.e. less short term profitable)
I honestly doubt if "sustainable" and "profitable" are at all compatible. Thinking as a geologist (on the multi-millennial time scales where sustainability needs to be demonstrated), I just can't square that with the desire for "profitability" on a human lifescale of a century or so (which presently requires you to have children and for them to inherit from you).
Well, I know that my children won't suffer in the crash. And I don't really care about anyone else's.
How is that going to help his storage problems? You've just substituted the relatively simple task of OCR (even if the data that is OCR'd is an encrypted data stream) with a tremendously more difficult task of detecting and breaking the steganography then additionally decoding it. Since steganography (as applied to images) typically hides the data in non-random distributions of the low-order bits of data bytes (leaving the high-order bits to continue to describe the masking image), then you are going to have to preserve the image quality to the last 1 or 2 colour hues, then scan it to that precision, then correctly break both the steganography and any compression or encryption.
The original problem was to store the data, not to hide it. The fact that there is a fire-safe data store involved should indicate to someone that there is data stored in this data store, and therefore that if there is an innocuous- looking picture in there, then steganography is going to be high on the list of suspicions.
It may be a silly problem, but that doesn't mean that it deserves a silly answer.
Our rights are as respected as much today as they ever have been - i.e. not at all. And no, I'm not happy with the situation. Nor do I believe that the politicians are going to do anything about it (it's not in their interest to).
So, do I get on with my life, or do I shit myself up about something that I'm not going to be able to change? I've seen enough fucked up things at work over around 1/3 of the planet (working to keep the western world in the resource-guzzling gluttony that everyone seems to consider to be their right human right), to have no illusions that the forces of oppression and down-treading are actually pretty mild in most of the West. If you want jack-booted thugs, there's plenty of countries where you can go to get that experience and only pay for it with your life and your health.
The obvious expectation is that the NSA will retreat further into the background until there work is taken over by an even more secretive organisation. Conspiracy theorists will of course already know the names and helicopter colours of several layers of these.
So, what you're saying is : most website writers don't have anything relating to the real world (class 1), don't know how to raise money (2), don't have anything which people value sufficiently to part with money for (3), so they sell advertising space and their users vacant glassy-eyed stares?
Remind me again - does Slashdot have adverts? I've been getting that thing about "As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising" for so long now, I can't really remember if it has advertising or not. (OK, yes, there's slashvertisement, but "meh" ; some of that can go hilariously wrong.)
Well, an alien species that it's able to release in milliseconds what the sun in 300000 years is something to worry about, don't you think so?
If and only if they can get here (or beam that energy towards us) AND are aware of our existence. At the deduced distances (on quite shaky supporting evidence), they're going to only recently have become aware of the tremendous destruction of life on planet Earth by the poisonous emissions of one recently-developed group of organisms. Oxygen - horrible stuff ! Leave it to the Eukaryotes - they'll be gone in a billennium or several.
I've still only seen about 1 and a half of the Star Bores films - is it 6 or nine now? - and I find my desire for my post-breakfast shit to be much more significant than my non-existant desire to watch the rest.
That would be the Austro-Hungarian EMPIRE. In case you hadn't heard, an EMPIRE is a group of countries with a common ruler.
Actually... an empire is a region where the command of one person (the "imperium") is accepted in military matters, and generally in "statecraft" as well (war being, as always, the continuation of diplomacy by non-diplomatic means). So, the military command (imperium) of Attila over the various tribes and groups of the semi-nomadic "Huns" would be as good an example of an empire as the Romans with all their marble and fora. Ghenghiz Khan might be an even better example. If I were a bastard setting questions for a politics exam, I might ask students to discuss the assertion that "in 1991, Norman Schwartzkopf was Emperor of the nations Crusading against Iraq" (noting that "discuss" means that the quality of your argument is under assessment, not whether you agree or disagree with the statement).
Slashdot Mirror
Around about 50:50 at the moment ; it was more fission-sourced in the past - half lives and all that jazz.
And that would work ... how?
When did trends suggest that? I must have been dead during the past decade when the trends suggested that cloud providers could ever be trusted.
Even that God guy has a terrible record for smiting people with droughts and so on, suggesting that he's never been the most reliable of cloud providers.
Indeed. Which is probably why that's not the argument that they are making for developing this technology.
Being a heretic, I RTFA'd and found :
[... such as museums and national archives]
So, say you are responsible for your country's archive of census data. Obviously you have at least two remote duplicates. Now, in each remote data centre, do you maintain a bank of hard drives with their well-known characteristics of burning out every few years, or a considerably smaller number of these devices with their own (currently unquantified, but hopefully considerably longer) lifetime? Change discs every decade when you finish collating the next census.
What you need to do is to look at the lifetime figures for the reading (and writing) machines, and then calculate which is the more efficient option for your use case. If the lifetime figures aren't available (yet), then you and some of your sys-admin colleagues need to decide whether to take a punt, then put a budget proposal together. It's called "working through the problem". You might like to try it one day instead of shooting your AC mouth off.
Because people like simple solutions to complex problems, which they can then pretend that they've dealt with.
Do you want Kool-Aid with that?
"Stare-Into-Laser-With-Remaining-Eye" Department?
There are people born without fingerprints - or with undetectably shallow ones. 4 August 2011 : Scientists find 'no fingerprint' gene mutation
Unsurprisingly it is sometimes called "Immigration Delay Disease"
One from my history : oil production platform was having an add-on applied to it - a module that would compress produced gas and pump it down a newly installed pipeline for sale onshore, instead of being used for fuel and burned off. Project required some machinery that connected to the existing machinery on the platform, plus a steel jacket set on the seabed to support the new machinery.
Long story short : left hand design team built the support jacket on the assumption that sea level was figure X above seabed (a measure called "Lowest Astronomical Tides") ; right hand design team designed the surface equipment, pumps, etc on the assumption that things were so far above sea-level. But they used a measure of sea level called "Mean Sea Level".
Major fuck up ; things didn't fit ; lines that should have let liquids run back to the platform sloped the wrong way ; no room or weight to put pumps onto the lines. M.A.J.O.R. fuck up. Took months to bodge up a solution. People responsible either fired or promoted - I never found out which. Situation 'Normal' : All Fucked Up.
That's been happening since ... well before the Romans. Why should it change now?
Oh, he'll die, sure enough. Probably of some nasty sexually-transmitted disease and the pathologist won't notice the inoculation mark. They'll have to burn the body "for public safety".
Death won't be sufficient ; there will have to be humiliation too.
On the other hand, no worry about drive-by downloads, malicious websites etc. ASCII files come in on a memory stick ; PDFs leave the same way and go to the computers on the customer's network.
Looks like all those armed vigilantes are being really effective. Every thing in America is so much bigger and better than here in the dowdy outside world. (This is "sarcasm", in case you haven't heard of it.)
How do you know? The only person I know who was circumcised as an aware person (rather than an infant) was done before he lost his virginity, so he had no opportunity to compare the two circumstances. I suppose it is possible that there are people who've got the appropriate experience, but I've never (knowingly) met one.
The logic, according to a castrated hooker I was fucking one time in Abu Dhabi, is that by ensuring that the woman doesn't have most of the equipment necessary to enjoy having sex, then she's unlikely to actually go out and want to have sex with anyone, including people who aren't her husband. She'd been done when she was 8, by her mother and aunt. She got more pleasure from being fucked anally than vaginally.
Just because it's a horrible mutilation doesn't mean the the people doing it are insensitive, unthinking or illogical. They just have different opinions to you about the value of women.
There is a joke about the Arabs which is popular in the oilfield stating that "a boy for pleasure, a woman for children and a goat for warmth" ; while it's an oversimplification, there is certainly a basis in truth. The charges at the brothels tell you what the relative values are - compliant (young) men cost more than women of any age ; "swept" or "unswept" doesn't make a difference (the prostitute's opinion on the transaction isn't considered important).
They must have been high-grade idiots to manage that.
I honestly doubt if "sustainable" and "profitable" are at all compatible. Thinking as a geologist (on the multi-millennial time scales where sustainability needs to be demonstrated), I just can't square that with the desire for "profitability" on a human lifescale of a century or so (which presently requires you to have children and for them to inherit from you).
Well, I know that my children won't suffer in the crash. And I don't really care about anyone else's.
How is that going to help his storage problems? You've just substituted the relatively simple task of OCR (even if the data that is OCR'd is an encrypted data stream) with a tremendously more difficult task of detecting and breaking the steganography then additionally decoding it. Since steganography (as applied to images) typically hides the data in non-random distributions of the low-order bits of data bytes (leaving the high-order bits to continue to describe the masking image), then you are going to have to preserve the image quality to the last 1 or 2 colour hues, then scan it to that precision, then correctly break both the steganography and any compression or encryption.
The original problem was to store the data, not to hide it. The fact that there is a fire-safe data store involved should indicate to someone that there is data stored in this data store, and therefore that if there is an innocuous- looking picture in there, then steganography is going to be high on the list of suspicions.
It may be a silly problem, but that doesn't mean that it deserves a silly answer.
Surely the problem is that you're so impatient that it takes you less than 40 years to want a 2-by-4.
So, do I get on with my life, or do I shit myself up about something that I'm not going to be able to change? I've seen enough fucked up things at work over around 1/3 of the planet (working to keep the western world in the resource-guzzling gluttony that everyone seems to consider to be their right human right), to have no illusions that the forces of oppression and down-treading are actually pretty mild in most of the West. If you want jack-booted thugs, there's plenty of countries where you can go to get that experience and only pay for it with your life and your health.
The obvious expectation is that the NSA will retreat further into the background until there work is taken over by an even more secretive organisation. Conspiracy theorists will of course already know the names and helicopter colours of several layers of these.
Dodgy keyboard connector on my tablet!
Remind me again - does Slashdot have adverts? I've been getting that thing about "As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising" for so long now, I can't really remember if it has advertising or not. (OK, yes, there's slashvertisement, but "meh" ; some of that can go hilariously wrong.)
If and only if they can get here (or beam that energy towards us) AND are aware of our existence. At the deduced distances (on quite shaky supporting evidence), they're going to only recently have become aware of the tremendous destruction of life on planet Earth by the poisonous emissions of one recently-developed group of organisms. Oxygen - horrible stuff ! Leave it to the Eukaryotes - they'll be gone in a billennium or several.
I've still only seen about 1 and a half of the Star Bores films - is it 6 or nine now? - and I find my desire for my post-breakfast shit to be much more significant than my non-existant desire to watch the rest.
Actually ... an empire is a region where the command of one person (the "imperium") is accepted in military matters, and generally in "statecraft" as well (war being, as always, the continuation of diplomacy by non-diplomatic means). So, the military command (imperium) of Attila over the various tribes and groups of the semi-nomadic "Huns" would be as good an example of an empire as the Romans with all their marble and fora. Ghenghiz Khan might be an even better example. If I were a bastard setting questions for a politics exam, I might ask students to discuss the assertion that "in 1991, Norman Schwartzkopf was Emperor of the nations Crusading against Iraq" (noting that "discuss" means that the quality of your argument is under assessment, not whether you agree or disagree with the statement).