I've met creationist nuclear physicists, so I know what you mean. My purpose was not to say "because X% believe this, it is true" (science isn't terribly democratic...) but rather to illustrate that science is not about atheism. Personally - and this really is just my personal opinion - I am skeptical of any non-agnostic scientist, because it is so easy to project personal beliefs on data. Indeed, many well-known scientists who achieved much (from the ancient Greeks right the way through to recent remarks by Professor Watson) have suffered horribly because they couldn't get past the limitations created by their own prejudices. It obviously doesn't stop them achieving much, but think of how much more they could have done had they followed the sage advice of allowing the theories to be based on the data rather than basing the data on their theories.
The majority of EVP recordings are simply a consequence of the noise used to make such recordings. The human ear is good at picking up patterns, particularly when we're told that there's a pattern to pick up. Because the noise is random, it is inevitable that on a long enough recording, you WILL get a sequence that the brain is capable of fitting into words. If you add into that external sounds (including ones that are nominally not audible but where the overlap with the noise IS audible) and radio waves (any microphone lead is a primitive aerial), you end up with many opportunities to capture something that could not be heard at the time and yet can appear to make sense after the fact.
Now, I will NOT claim that for all EVPs, because I have not examined all EVPs and nor has anyone else. It is possible that some EVPs have genuine unexplainable sounds, but with the way they are currently done, you could never prove that.
Is it possible to devise an EVP experiment in which you could eliminate at least some of these possibilities? Yes. For this, you will need a computer, a soundcard, a good pseudo random number generator, two playback systems that are locked in step, two recorders that are locked in step, a wooden frame that is perfectly square and whose sides are equal in length to the length of lead on the microphone, and some copper wire.
First, use the computer to generate something that is mathematically white noise. This will be your noise source for the EVP experiment. The computer must retain a copy of the original noise. Next, create a square frame aerial using the frame and the copper wire. This is far more sensitive to radio signals than the microphone lead. Now, go out to where you want to conduct the EVP experiment. Align the square frame aerial with the microphone lead, so that the lead runs absolutely equidistant and parallel to two of the sides. You want the two playback units to play back the white noise exactly in step to their respective recorders, so that if both get an identical signal, it is superimposed onto an identical segment of white noise. The lockstep for the recorders ensures that this isn't distorted by one being faster than the other.
Once you've collected your data, the next step is to upload it into the computer. The signal from the tape recorder with the microphone should be inverted, once it has been uploaded. If you now add the two recorded signals together, the noise and the inverted noise will cancel out, as will anything that was recorded on both systems. All that you have left there is anything unique to one recorder. You also add the recording from the microphone to the retained copy of the white noise. This time, just the noise falls away and whatever you have left is just what was recorded over the microphone. Any distortion of the noise (as is argued by EVP experts) will be retained, as subtracting one signal from the other will produce a difference.
Contrast-stretch both recordings, until whatever is left is well within hearing range. Anything that exists on the second noise-subtracted sample that does NOT exist on the first is a sound that was picked up by the microphone. The odds are high you will get a lot of animal noises. If there is speech, I would be willing to accept that as a genuine EVP. Anything that exists on both and in an amplified form on the first is a radio transmission. Plain and simple. Anything that exists on the first and not at all on the second - no matter how faint - is either a radio signal polarized along the axis you didn't have the microphone lead, OR is a genuine EVP. There are really no other possibilities.
So, there's one possibility that has to be EVP and another that has a chance of being EVP. Every other result is interference of one form or another. Illusory sounds in the static are impossible in this, as you have subtracted the static after the experiment. Whatever is left is real and not an illusion, it just might not be the real that you'd want.
It is possible to prove there isn't a final digit in the square root of 2, that there isn't a sixth regular solid, that you can't trisect an angle by construction, and that there are no honest lawyers. Now, beyond that, you have a point.
...many scientists are either agnostic or "weakly" atheist (ie: they don't believe in a God but don't take that as a fundamentalist stance). The more questioning scientists start by asking what a "God" is, anyway, as typical definitions are flawed. Most primitive societies ascribe assorted supernatural powers to various natural and supernatural entities, none of whom meet with any modern dictionary definition of a God.
(There is nothing particularly supreme about any of the Greek, Nordic or Celtic "Gods", for example. Nor were they ascribed unique ownership of any segment of worldly affairs. As best as I can tell, such views seem to originate more with the Semitic peoples and it is largely Judeo-Christian anthropologists who attach such views to others.)
Without a clear, meaningful definition of what it is a person is rejecting, it makes no sense to talk about rejecting it, because what you are rejecting, what others think you are rejecting and what you think you are rejecting are not going to be the same except by chance alone. However, this gets interesting in the case of anything which, by definition, transcends that which can be defined. It's like asking a computer to solve a non-computable problem. If a computer could solve it, it would not be non-computable.
The easiest way to handle this case is to simply place it into the category of "unknowable", along with all of the things that science has firmly and definitively shown to be unknowable. If you add two unknowables together, you still end up with an unknowable, so it really doesn't matter which of the unknowables are real and which aren't. At least, from any kind of scientific perspective.
If everyone gets a full house on their Buzzword Bingo cards from the summary alone, we're going to have to divide up the prize again. Now to cut the coffee cake into 100,000 equal slices. Don't cut your fingers on the crumbs...
First, there are science and tech skills, and there are science and tech skills. Even saying "computer science" has no actual meaning, as computer science covers a whole multitude of possible subjects. It's too vague a term, especially in a field that has fragmented as much as computing and where each fragment is moving at a stupendous pace. Remember, courses are 3-4 years long. In order to actually be in the game, you therefore must not only learn the theory (as it is now), you must also learn about the practice as it will be when you graduate. Ten to twenty years ago, that was a piece of cake. Today, four years is ample time to see perhaps one to three complete paradigm shifts in the marketplace.
Second, it's important to examine these international rankings. How many countries produce top-of-the-line scientists? It's not very many. Asian countries, such as Japan, produce superb engineers but lousy innovators. When it comes to improving upon an existing design, the Asian nations are second to none. But how many actual first-generation inventions come from such countries? Not many.
Why is that important? Because the market will saturate with such people, and saturate quickly. Innovators and inventors aren't subject to saturation, because they invent new markets. You can't saturate something that doesn't exist yet.
What has this got to do with America? Many American Universities are currently geared towards satisfying yesterday's markets, which means their students are half a decade out of touch by the time they get into the field. The same goes for British Universities, too. Once upon a time, employers would pay for students to go to University, as a graduate could be thrown straight in at the deep end and would function perfectly well - if not better than someone who had been in the field for a while and had drifted out of touch.
These days, that does not happen very often. The reason that so many places want certifications is that degrees are no longer considered a reliable indicator of ability or knowledge. And that's even after the fact that certifications are crammer courses that rarely impart understanding. Certifications are, however, usually very current. And that is why they have value to employers.
Consider this. Building something that has essentially been built many times before becomes menial labor. Building something new requires thought, imagination and comprehension. Downgrading the top-of-the-line to the level of menial drudgery may well push up a whole host of nations to near the top of the international rankings. If you expect your workforce to be incapable and incompetent, you will rarely be disappointed.
Finally, the proof isn't in the official charts. The proof, as always, is in the results. Is America a demonstrably geekier culture, these days? No, I wouldn't have said so. Universities in America show none of the revolutionary thinking they exhibited in the 60s and 70s, non-conformity is down, passions have faded to near-oblivion. Several hacks and projects by students in America have been classified by the US Government. Name me a single instance where this has produced an outcry, a duplicate effort or indeed any reaction at all.
Is that really important? Yes, it is. The sciences and technologies are fundamentally philosophies. They are works of the mind. If the mind has been dulled and is not capable of critical thinking, that mind is also incapable of performing science. (The recent case of Prof. Watson is a good example. He has clearly allowed his mind to be dulled over the decades, as demonstrated by his interview. His ability to manage is probably just fine, but the reason he had time to manage was because he was no longer able to do anything else.)
The architecture (a vector processor) is not in the vanilla kernel, but the kernel is fairly parallel, thread-safe and SMP-safe, so I really can't see any reason why you couldn't put Linux on such a platform. Because a lot of standard parallel software these days assumes a cluster of discrete nodes with shared resources, they'd be best borrowing code from Xen and possibly MOSIX to simulate a common structure.
(This would waste some of the compute power, but if the total time saved from not changing the application exceeds the time that could be saved using more of the cycles available, you win. It is this problem of creating illusions of whatever architecture happens to be application-friendly at a given time that has made much of my work in parallel architectures - such as the one produced by Lightfleet - so interesting... and so subject to office politics.)
...Linux is better than Windows. Yes, at last the very criticism launched against Linux over a lack of built-in drivers backfires! By requiring Linux users to pester manufacturers, we suppress criminal activity. Microsoft Windows, on the other hand, supplies most such drivers on CD, aiding terrorists and criminals. It is not Linux that is anti-American, this story clearly proves that it is Windows that is anti-American.
(Dripping sarcasm mode off)
Seriously, this story does illustrate the importance of computer literacy by users and corporations alike, and the consequences of ignorance. If this guy had bought the machine at one of the many auctions corporations and governments around the world use to dump unwanted machines, the chances are that the machine would have been just as loaded with personal information usable in an identity theft scam and just as in need of special drivers to unlock it. In this case, the guy is almost certainly not innocent, but next time an innocent might easily be unfairly accused and convicted of holding sensitive (or classified) information. Remember, auctioned and resold disks frequently have such information. I believe studies have reported 30% of disks bought had highly valuable commercial information either exposed or in an easily recoverable form, and that classified information has been occasionally exposed this way.
It also shows the importance behind training tech support staff at companies to be aware of social engineering techniques, as that has always been - and remains - the greatest weakness. Technological weaknesses are commonplace but have limited value in comparison. (The possible exception was a report some years back that reporters were finding that they could war-dial banks and access the main computers without needing a username or password. However, I believe that in most cases, that problem has been consigned to the trash heap of history.)
Finally, it shows the US needs a better class of thief. ("Huh???") Throughout history, security has been considered a political tool, not a social or technical one, until after the fact of it being defeated. The evolution of locks from a simple key to the medieval "thief lock" (you turned the key backwards - turning it forwards would make it impossible to unlock unless you knew how to release a catch in the lock) to the Yale lock's deadlocking mechanism to some of the highly sophisticated locks of today were all driven by thieves forcing the pace of progress. If we'd waited for companies to progress on their own, we'd still be waiting for the lock to be invented.
However, security isn't just about malicious intent. The Internet Worm demonstrated that accidental releases of buggy software can cause widespread havoc. Security that is incapable of containing unintentional potential disasters is just as problematic as security that is incapable of containing malicious persons. As software has become more sophisticated and powerful, the need for better security against bugs has grown. However, the implementation of such security does not really exist. Where security exists, it exists because of the malicious users. Buggy software is often dismissed as a hazard of the trade, whether it crashes a hard drive, a multi-billion dollar rocket or a high-speed semi-autonomous or fully-autonomous UAV.
(Here, I'm including writing better software as better security, as programmers seem allergic to the idea that they should be writing far cleaner code than they are. Bugs are supposedly inevitable, but I'm not convinced that that is true in general or even in the specific cases where bugs have caused serious problems. Any integrated test worth a damn should pick up whether one module is using feet and another is using miles, whatever NASA might say. A recent report on a UAV crash cited a console crash. Fault-tolerance and High Availability, anyone? If a full Linux OS takes 5 seconds to boot from cold, then that is the maximum time for a cold standby swi
I have always argued, and will continue to argue, that if you want to minimize crime, you must have a well-balanced society where understanding, technology, society and cultural expression advance together, that to let one advance and not another will create friction and division, and that it is this friction and division which leads to some forms of crime.
Other forms of crime are a product of society's inadequate response to the mental and physical needs of others. If is unclear how many of the mentally ill end up carrying out crimes through their illness, but it's probably not insignificant. There are also unquestionably crimes of need and crimes of desperation, but again it's unclear just how many. These won't be corrected by a balanced society alone, they require a level of social protection that America especially has been reluctant to give.
The third category of crime - that of whim - will never be prevented through better education (although it may lead to fewer people giving in to such whims) or through better mental healthcare (although that might someday include some more acceptable alternatives, if anyone could figure out how). This category can't be so easily dealt with. The best I can suggest here is that the better education will provide fewer opportunities and the better healthcare will provide greater resilience. Thus, the crimes will reap fewer rewards and create less of an impact.
I'm going outside now to watch the Orionids. Good thing you can't copyright an experience.
Dear Quokkapox,
Your experience of the Orionids is clearly derived in part from one of the movies either produced, being produced, or considered for being produced in light of this experience, and is thus infringing on our copyrights somehow. We insist that you cease and desist in your observations immediately and buy a stackload of crappy and expensive movies instead.
Yours insincerely,
The MPAA Division of Inquisitors, a CIA Interrogator Production
My interpretation (which is just as invalid as everyone else's, Facebook included) would be that they are abolishing UserIDs altogether and switching to a 64-bit universal ID. That kinda makes sense, as it would make defining relationships between any two types of object easy.
I wouldn't call them commonplace - one gun-related homicide a month in 2007 for a population of 60+ million in less space than almost any US State is a damn good ratio and is largely down to the fact that a farmer armed with a shotgun loaded with rock salt is considerably less dangerous than a maniac with a concealable handgun and quite possibly hollow-tip rounds.
If you eliminate from the calculation all weapons owned by sport shooters like Sebastian Coe, the farming community, and airport security guards*, I'm not convinced you'd have many left to account for.
Yes, abandoned mills have been converted into workshops for reactivating weapons and supplying them to gangs. That's a problem, but not a grave one because if there's a shooting, it's more likely gang rivalry than an armed robbery. For example, the only notable shooting in Marple, a town just outside of Manchester in the northwest of England, was the assassination of the leader of a drug ring. Yes, Mancunians are more likely to be wary of Moss Side, Hulme and other catastrophically deprived neighborhoods, but those are virtually saintly compared to the no-go areas in the US, where people worry when there isn't a shooting.
Is the UK perfect or idyllic? No. Not by a long way. It's a wreck, disjoint and schizoid. It's merely a lot less of a wreck when it comes to gun violence than many other nations.
Yes, but name anything on the web today that wasn't being done by some combination of archie, gopher and WAIS. It all depends, of course, on the way in which this is done. There are MANY applications now for Linux for processing EEG and EKG data, CAT scans, MRIs and the like. Will either company develop formats that interoperate with these?
There are also packages specifically designed for indexing and sharing files. Will there be a DSpace filter supplied? Will Glimpse be able to search the metadata? Is any geographical data going to be in a format a GIS database can handle? (A person may wish to compare health information with where they were living at the time, for example. I'll assume for a moment that the data is confidential to the person concerned, at least in Europe where data privacy laws will be involved, and hopefully anonymous anywhere it's not confidential.)
Will data be correlatable or will each data chunk be in total isolation? Correlations might be interesting to people who suspect an undiagnosed underlying condition where multiple diagnosed symptoms exist and are treated, and might be a lot more convincing to doctors than patients who say "well, I don't think this really expensive treatment plan is working too well..."
It matters very little what people are saying they will code. Some things will prove intractable when the project specification is drawn up, when the developers try to implement it or when the managers run out of budget. Other things will evolve out of brainstorming sessions and wild drunken parties during the project. What actually ends up happening is rarely what is envisaged at the start, for all kinds of reasons. Sure, we can guess at what would be logical, but since when has a single project - Open Source, Closed Source or Hot Sauce - ever ended up being entirely - or even remotely - logical?
...were the main reason 98% of cops in Britain voted against being armed on a day-to-day basis and why specialist armed response units tended to be safer. Yes, there were "accidents". The subway shooting was one. However, they tend to be very rare as a percentage of the population. Not that that helps those who are shot, of course.
The problem is that it would be impossible to introduce a more civil police force in the United States or in any other country in which guns are commonplace. It only worked in Britain because it was in nobody's interest (police or criminal) to mess with the balance of power or to change the status quo. Short of having UN peacekeepers flood in and disarm everyone to an equal level of firepower, you couldn't possibly achieve that kind of metastable balance. However, automatic weapons (currently legal in the US) and other high-power weaponry would make mincemeat of any existing body armor and the policeman inside it, if they weren't armed and psychotic enough to shoot first.
I think the current situation is far too prone to error and BSOD, I think armed societies are far too much a reflection of medieval past than desired future, and I think it's impossible to improve on a situation when everyone assumes the worst, but frankly I can't think of any even remotely acceptable way of fixing a society that is still fighting the Revolutionary War.
...it was revealed that GALLUP and MORI are to beta-test the new product when it comes out, as it can't be any less accurate than surveying one ten-thousandth of the population on dubiously-phrased questions. Meanwhile, speculation that ATRAP will replace the current ballistic missile shield by printing out sufficient quantities of meaningless data to trap the missiles in the world's largest paper jam have been denied by Admiral Poindexter.
What if you have an n-ary system in which two or more supermassive stars are sufficiently close together that after the supernova, the total mass exceeds 10 solar masses even though no individual star did? (Since the star cores would merge at the common center of gravity, they would behave as a single remnant of the combined mass, NOT as individual collapsing objects.) Alternatively, if the black hole forms in a regular fashion but is in a dense enough zone - or a zone that has an obscenely large number of extra-solar supermassive planets - that it absorbs six or more solar masses before it can evaporate a comparable amount of mass, you'd reach the desired mass. Thirdly, my guess is that all simulations assume point singularities (probably the most common kind, assuming black hole theory is correct), which means that they won't be including Kerr Ring singularities or any of the other Really Weird Forms that have been predicted.
I'm sure that there are ways to fudge things so that the desired mass can be reached. Or, there again, the simulations could be wrong. That happens, for all that Michael Fish wishes otherwise. Well, maybe not. He stands to make a lot of money from his new book because of that fiasco.
hey won't dismiss you just like that. They'll first try two or three expensive medicines by the drug company sponsoring them that week, and THEN dismiss you. Well, after also prescribing the antidote (if any) to their earlier prescriptions.
Besides, back in the days of the IBCS module, you could transition ANY ix86-based Unix to Linux without any rewrites. That was one reason commercial Linux software started appearing - companies were losing support call income.
Slashdot Mirror
I've met creationist nuclear physicists, so I know what you mean. My purpose was not to say "because X% believe this, it is true" (science isn't terribly democratic...) but rather to illustrate that science is not about atheism. Personally - and this really is just my personal opinion - I am skeptical of any non-agnostic scientist, because it is so easy to project personal beliefs on data. Indeed, many well-known scientists who achieved much (from the ancient Greeks right the way through to recent remarks by Professor Watson) have suffered horribly because they couldn't get past the limitations created by their own prejudices. It obviously doesn't stop them achieving much, but think of how much more they could have done had they followed the sage advice of allowing the theories to be based on the data rather than basing the data on their theories.
Now, I will NOT claim that for all EVPs, because I have not examined all EVPs and nor has anyone else. It is possible that some EVPs have genuine unexplainable sounds, but with the way they are currently done, you could never prove that.
Is it possible to devise an EVP experiment in which you could eliminate at least some of these possibilities? Yes. For this, you will need a computer, a soundcard, a good pseudo random number generator, two playback systems that are locked in step, two recorders that are locked in step, a wooden frame that is perfectly square and whose sides are equal in length to the length of lead on the microphone, and some copper wire.
First, use the computer to generate something that is mathematically white noise. This will be your noise source for the EVP experiment. The computer must retain a copy of the original noise. Next, create a square frame aerial using the frame and the copper wire. This is far more sensitive to radio signals than the microphone lead. Now, go out to where you want to conduct the EVP experiment. Align the square frame aerial with the microphone lead, so that the lead runs absolutely equidistant and parallel to two of the sides. You want the two playback units to play back the white noise exactly in step to their respective recorders, so that if both get an identical signal, it is superimposed onto an identical segment of white noise. The lockstep for the recorders ensures that this isn't distorted by one being faster than the other.
Once you've collected your data, the next step is to upload it into the computer. The signal from the tape recorder with the microphone should be inverted, once it has been uploaded. If you now add the two recorded signals together, the noise and the inverted noise will cancel out, as will anything that was recorded on both systems. All that you have left there is anything unique to one recorder. You also add the recording from the microphone to the retained copy of the white noise. This time, just the noise falls away and whatever you have left is just what was recorded over the microphone. Any distortion of the noise (as is argued by EVP experts) will be retained, as subtracting one signal from the other will produce a difference.
Contrast-stretch both recordings, until whatever is left is well within hearing range. Anything that exists on the second noise-subtracted sample that does NOT exist on the first is a sound that was picked up by the microphone. The odds are high you will get a lot of animal noises. If there is speech, I would be willing to accept that as a genuine EVP. Anything that exists on both and in an amplified form on the first is a radio transmission. Plain and simple. Anything that exists on the first and not at all on the second - no matter how faint - is either a radio signal polarized along the axis you didn't have the microphone lead, OR is a genuine EVP. There are really no other possibilities.
So, there's one possibility that has to be EVP and another that has a chance of being EVP. Every other result is interference of one form or another. Illusory sounds in the static are impossible in this, as you have subtracted the static after the experiment. Whatever is left is real and not an illusion, it just might not be the real that you'd want.
It is possible to prove there isn't a final digit in the square root of 2, that there isn't a sixth regular solid, that you can't trisect an angle by construction, and that there are no honest lawyers. Now, beyond that, you have a point.
Not until after Ragnarok, anyway.
(There is nothing particularly supreme about any of the Greek, Nordic or Celtic "Gods", for example. Nor were they ascribed unique ownership of any segment of worldly affairs. As best as I can tell, such views seem to originate more with the Semitic peoples and it is largely Judeo-Christian anthropologists who attach such views to others.)
Without a clear, meaningful definition of what it is a person is rejecting, it makes no sense to talk about rejecting it, because what you are rejecting, what others think you are rejecting and what you think you are rejecting are not going to be the same except by chance alone. However, this gets interesting in the case of anything which, by definition, transcends that which can be defined. It's like asking a computer to solve a non-computable problem. If a computer could solve it, it would not be non-computable.
The easiest way to handle this case is to simply place it into the category of "unknowable", along with all of the things that science has firmly and definitively shown to be unknowable. If you add two unknowables together, you still end up with an unknowable, so it really doesn't matter which of the unknowables are real and which aren't. At least, from any kind of scientific perspective.
If everyone gets a full house on their Buzzword Bingo cards from the summary alone, we're going to have to divide up the prize again. Now to cut the coffee cake into 100,000 equal slices. Don't cut your fingers on the crumbs...
Second, it's important to examine these international rankings. How many countries produce top-of-the-line scientists? It's not very many. Asian countries, such as Japan, produce superb engineers but lousy innovators. When it comes to improving upon an existing design, the Asian nations are second to none. But how many actual first-generation inventions come from such countries? Not many.
Why is that important? Because the market will saturate with such people, and saturate quickly. Innovators and inventors aren't subject to saturation, because they invent new markets. You can't saturate something that doesn't exist yet.
What has this got to do with America? Many American Universities are currently geared towards satisfying yesterday's markets, which means their students are half a decade out of touch by the time they get into the field. The same goes for British Universities, too. Once upon a time, employers would pay for students to go to University, as a graduate could be thrown straight in at the deep end and would function perfectly well - if not better than someone who had been in the field for a while and had drifted out of touch.
These days, that does not happen very often. The reason that so many places want certifications is that degrees are no longer considered a reliable indicator of ability or knowledge. And that's even after the fact that certifications are crammer courses that rarely impart understanding. Certifications are, however, usually very current. And that is why they have value to employers.
Consider this. Building something that has essentially been built many times before becomes menial labor. Building something new requires thought, imagination and comprehension. Downgrading the top-of-the-line to the level of menial drudgery may well push up a whole host of nations to near the top of the international rankings. If you expect your workforce to be incapable and incompetent, you will rarely be disappointed.
Finally, the proof isn't in the official charts. The proof, as always, is in the results. Is America a demonstrably geekier culture, these days? No, I wouldn't have said so. Universities in America show none of the revolutionary thinking they exhibited in the 60s and 70s, non-conformity is down, passions have faded to near-oblivion. Several hacks and projects by students in America have been classified by the US Government. Name me a single instance where this has produced an outcry, a duplicate effort or indeed any reaction at all.
Is that really important? Yes, it is. The sciences and technologies are fundamentally philosophies. They are works of the mind. If the mind has been dulled and is not capable of critical thinking, that mind is also incapable of performing science. (The recent case of Prof. Watson is a good example. He has clearly allowed his mind to be dulled over the decades, as demonstrated by his interview. His ability to manage is probably just fine, but the reason he had time to manage was because he was no longer able to do anything else.)
(This would waste some of the compute power, but if the total time saved from not changing the application exceeds the time that could be saved using more of the cycles available, you win. It is this problem of creating illusions of whatever architecture happens to be application-friendly at a given time that has made much of my work in parallel architectures - such as the one produced by Lightfleet - so interesting... and so subject to office politics.)
(Dripping sarcasm mode off)
Seriously, this story does illustrate the importance of computer literacy by users and corporations alike, and the consequences of ignorance. If this guy had bought the machine at one of the many auctions corporations and governments around the world use to dump unwanted machines, the chances are that the machine would have been just as loaded with personal information usable in an identity theft scam and just as in need of special drivers to unlock it. In this case, the guy is almost certainly not innocent, but next time an innocent might easily be unfairly accused and convicted of holding sensitive (or classified) information. Remember, auctioned and resold disks frequently have such information. I believe studies have reported 30% of disks bought had highly valuable commercial information either exposed or in an easily recoverable form, and that classified information has been occasionally exposed this way.
It also shows the importance behind training tech support staff at companies to be aware of social engineering techniques, as that has always been - and remains - the greatest weakness. Technological weaknesses are commonplace but have limited value in comparison. (The possible exception was a report some years back that reporters were finding that they could war-dial banks and access the main computers without needing a username or password. However, I believe that in most cases, that problem has been consigned to the trash heap of history.)
Finally, it shows the US needs a better class of thief. ("Huh???") Throughout history, security has been considered a political tool, not a social or technical one, until after the fact of it being defeated. The evolution of locks from a simple key to the medieval "thief lock" (you turned the key backwards - turning it forwards would make it impossible to unlock unless you knew how to release a catch in the lock) to the Yale lock's deadlocking mechanism to some of the highly sophisticated locks of today were all driven by thieves forcing the pace of progress. If we'd waited for companies to progress on their own, we'd still be waiting for the lock to be invented.
However, security isn't just about malicious intent. The Internet Worm demonstrated that accidental releases of buggy software can cause widespread havoc. Security that is incapable of containing unintentional potential disasters is just as problematic as security that is incapable of containing malicious persons. As software has become more sophisticated and powerful, the need for better security against bugs has grown. However, the implementation of such security does not really exist. Where security exists, it exists because of the malicious users. Buggy software is often dismissed as a hazard of the trade, whether it crashes a hard drive, a multi-billion dollar rocket or a high-speed semi-autonomous or fully-autonomous UAV.
(Here, I'm including writing better software as better security, as programmers seem allergic to the idea that they should be writing far cleaner code than they are. Bugs are supposedly inevitable, but I'm not convinced that that is true in general or even in the specific cases where bugs have caused serious problems. Any integrated test worth a damn should pick up whether one module is using feet and another is using miles, whatever NASA might say. A recent report on a UAV crash cited a console crash. Fault-tolerance and High Availability, anyone? If a full Linux OS takes 5 seconds to boot from cold, then that is the maximum time for a cold standby swi
Other forms of crime are a product of society's inadequate response to the mental and physical needs of others. If is unclear how many of the mentally ill end up carrying out crimes through their illness, but it's probably not insignificant. There are also unquestionably crimes of need and crimes of desperation, but again it's unclear just how many. These won't be corrected by a balanced society alone, they require a level of social protection that America especially has been reluctant to give.
The third category of crime - that of whim - will never be prevented through better education (although it may lead to fewer people giving in to such whims) or through better mental healthcare (although that might someday include some more acceptable alternatives, if anyone could figure out how). This category can't be so easily dealt with. The best I can suggest here is that the better education will provide fewer opportunities and the better healthcare will provide greater resilience. Thus, the crimes will reap fewer rewards and create less of an impact.
Dear Quokkapox,
Your experience of the Orionids is clearly derived in part from one of the movies either produced, being produced, or considered for being produced in light of this experience, and is thus infringing on our copyrights somehow. We insist that you cease and desist in your observations immediately and buy a stackload of crappy and expensive movies instead.
Yours insincerely,
The MPAA Division of Inquisitors, a CIA Interrogator Production
My interpretation (which is just as invalid as everyone else's, Facebook included) would be that they are abolishing UserIDs altogether and switching to a 64-bit universal ID. That kinda makes sense, as it would make defining relationships between any two types of object easy.
If you eliminate from the calculation all weapons owned by sport shooters like Sebastian Coe, the farming community, and airport security guards*, I'm not convinced you'd have many left to account for.
Yes, abandoned mills have been converted into workshops for reactivating weapons and supplying them to gangs. That's a problem, but not a grave one because if there's a shooting, it's more likely gang rivalry than an armed robbery. For example, the only notable shooting in Marple, a town just outside of Manchester in the northwest of England, was the assassination of the leader of a drug ring. Yes, Mancunians are more likely to be wary of Moss Side, Hulme and other catastrophically deprived neighborhoods, but those are virtually saintly compared to the no-go areas in the US, where people worry when there isn't a shooting.
Is the UK perfect or idyllic? No. Not by a long way. It's a wreck, disjoint and schizoid. It's merely a lot less of a wreck when it comes to gun violence than many other nations.
There are also packages specifically designed for indexing and sharing files. Will there be a DSpace filter supplied? Will Glimpse be able to search the metadata? Is any geographical data going to be in a format a GIS database can handle? (A person may wish to compare health information with where they were living at the time, for example. I'll assume for a moment that the data is confidential to the person concerned, at least in Europe where data privacy laws will be involved, and hopefully anonymous anywhere it's not confidential.)
Will data be correlatable or will each data chunk be in total isolation? Correlations might be interesting to people who suspect an undiagnosed underlying condition where multiple diagnosed symptoms exist and are treated, and might be a lot more convincing to doctors than patients who say "well, I don't think this really expensive treatment plan is working too well..."
It matters very little what people are saying they will code. Some things will prove intractable when the project specification is drawn up, when the developers try to implement it or when the managers run out of budget. Other things will evolve out of brainstorming sessions and wild drunken parties during the project. What actually ends up happening is rarely what is envisaged at the start, for all kinds of reasons. Sure, we can guess at what would be logical, but since when has a single project - Open Source, Closed Source or Hot Sauce - ever ended up being entirely - or even remotely - logical?
I thought it meant they were going to supply the data to the betting stands at horse races. Well, same thing really, I guess.
The problem is that it would be impossible to introduce a more civil police force in the United States or in any other country in which guns are commonplace. It only worked in Britain because it was in nobody's interest (police or criminal) to mess with the balance of power or to change the status quo. Short of having UN peacekeepers flood in and disarm everyone to an equal level of firepower, you couldn't possibly achieve that kind of metastable balance. However, automatic weapons (currently legal in the US) and other high-power weaponry would make mincemeat of any existing body armor and the policeman inside it, if they weren't armed and psychotic enough to shoot first.
I think the current situation is far too prone to error and BSOD, I think armed societies are far too much a reflection of medieval past than desired future, and I think it's impossible to improve on a situation when everyone assumes the worst, but frankly I can't think of any even remotely acceptable way of fixing a society that is still fighting the Revolutionary War.
He's on death row, I believe, for murders by the DC area shooter on account of being the effective triggerman.
...it was revealed that GALLUP and MORI are to beta-test the new product when it comes out, as it can't be any less accurate than surveying one ten-thousandth of the population on dubiously-phrased questions. Meanwhile, speculation that ATRAP will replace the current ballistic missile shield by printing out sufficient quantities of meaningless data to trap the missiles in the world's largest paper jam have been denied by Admiral Poindexter.
I'm sure that there are ways to fudge things so that the desired mass can be reached. Or, there again, the simulations could be wrong. That happens, for all that Michael Fish wishes otherwise. Well, maybe not. He stands to make a lot of money from his new book because of that fiasco.
...if they can't route the bribes correctly?
hey won't dismiss you just like that. They'll first try two or three expensive medicines by the drug company sponsoring them that week, and THEN dismiss you. Well, after also prescribing the antidote (if any) to their earlier prescriptions.
Whereas if you mix the fish poison with LSD and those magic mushrooms Holland is banning?
For the last time, George Bush did not have the password. It was far too long to remember, at two characters. Rove had it.
You can't, just yet - the BOINC client for it keeps dividing by zero for some reason.
Besides, back in the days of the IBCS module, you could transition ANY ix86-based Unix to Linux without any rewrites. That was one reason commercial Linux software started appearing - companies were losing support call income.