16,000 people, out of a population of about 5.4 million, that's about a 0.3% chances they got him, or perhaps one of his family's personal information.
Well, he is using MacOS. If he were using a real operating system, he might have access to more authentic random numbers from/dev/random.
But what an incredibly ugly hack. If it's so damned important to you, just buy a $20 USB-FM receiver, tune into the cosmic microwave background, and record and hash the audio stream from that. Or point your webcam at a bubbles generated from a fish-tank bubbler and hash the video stream. There are so many easy ways to get moderately random numbers, that would certainly be much more random and easier to program than parsing the not-so-random stuff from tcpdump.
He probably never even bothered to query Google for natural sources of randomness, or he may have run accross LavaRnd.
Please, everyone, don't even think about taking TFA seriously.
The OS+hypervisor has a larger attack surface than the OS alone, period. Unless you can prove your hypervisor is un-hackable (don't make me laugh), a virtualized system is less secure.
Even Windows, at the kernel level, is quite secure, and should be more secure than using it with a hypervisor; even a hypervisor made by Microsoft for Windows (or should I say "especially a hypervisor made by Microsoft") will be less secure than the OS alone.
Face it, most modern operating systems are secure enough to run on metal without ever allowing unauthorized access to hardware. The real hacks to worry about are at the application level and the human level, and virtualization has nothing to say about isolation there.
If Crosby were making the case that virtualization makes it easier to manage operating system instances and thus reduce human error in cloud-computing services, I would agree with him. But isolation provided by a hypervisor will never be more secure than a properly designed and tested OS running on metal.
The reason software is bigger today is not necessarily because it does more. Think about byte alignments, and instruction sizes. What if a program can compile to some 20,000 instructions. What if your CPU can represent entire instructions as a single byte? What if some instructions require 5 bytes? If, on average, you have say, 2.5 bytes, then you will need 500,000 bytes of space to store 20,000 instructions. If you need a solid 4 bytes per instruction, then you need 800,000 bytes to store 20,000 instructions.
It all depends on the CPU and the optimizations used.
So writing a computer virus could involve either hacking the software running on the bacteria NAND circuits... or could involve writing a bacteriophage that attacks the circutiry itself.
Or what if a bacteria learned how to colonize and take-over a human brain? Just like the Borg!!! I'm in your brain, hacking your dreams.
As if it wasn't bad enough worrying about computer viruses, now we have to worry about computer bacteria too, and computer bacteria viruses (bacteriophage hacking).
"It's a T-1000."
Guns and bombs have checmicals, moving parts. It doesn't work that way. But it can form solid metal shapes, like knives, and other stabbing weapons.
Now Google is the target of the establishment
on
IRS Auditing Google
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· Score: 1
Despite all of Google's privacy regressions (which by the way, are not nearly as bad as Facebook's) they have done a good job of shaking-up the establishment by making a lot of information free and easily available. This makes them the enemy of the establishment, that losely-knit group of corporate/government/media who are not necessarily working together, but all operate on the same corrupt principles.
I am guessing that Google doesn't do a good enough job of obeying these principles. Now, a tax-dodge which the IRS tends to overlook when other corporations do it, is being used as an excuse to go after Google.
This is a warning to Google. The establishment is saying: act like a real (corrupt) corporation or be destroyed by our gang of lawyers, politicians, and federal investigators.
That's because the Tea Party doesn't defecate on their cars. Daily Mail [dailymail.co.uk]
Fuck you and your right-wing propaganda machine.
It's because Fox News was both defending the Tea Party, and keeping them in line. Any imagery of cops beating down on Tea Party protesters would only be fodder for their anti-government (anti-Obama) talking points.
Who's defending Occupy Wall Street? Is the "Left Wing" Media (CNN, MSNBC, NPR) running 24-hour news coverage on how unfair the police have treated the protesters on Wall Street, in the same way that Fox hyped and gave coverage to the Tea Party? No. Nobody is defending Occupy Wall Street. There are no buses paid for by Koch industries, giving them free food, transportation, and otherwise keeping them orderly.
The so-called "Left-Wing media" doesn't exist, it is a fictional demon invented by Fox news and Talk Radio to make the ignorant masses of right-wing sympathizers believe they are a repressed minority fighting against a greater evil (the "liberals"). But no "left-wing media" even exists, and anyone who thinks it does exist is a severely deluded puppet of the state/wealthy-elite. For this reason, occupy Wall Street WILL FAIL: there is no solidarity or sympathy for people who are unemployed or otherwise abused by the system. There is still hope that things will get better. But things will not get better. If Obama is re-elected, he will not solve the problem at all. If a Republican is elected, he will only make the current problems worse.
10% unemployment and rising. If this goes on much longer (and it will), that 10% will grow to 20%, maybe 30%. Then the 30% WILL loose their last fleeting trace of hope. When that happens, you will no longer see 30% unemployment, you will see 30% of all Americans become suicidal. You will see 30% of Americans so desperate for food that no amount violent force by the police or military will keep that 30% in-line. Their lives can get no worse, and they will all die fighting for freedom, and in the process, take as many of the 1% down with them as they can in the process.
This is one of the last chances for a peaceful resolution. The problem is, the resolution is impossible: campaign finance reform, individual tax equality with corporations, solid social safety-nets for the elderly and incapacitated, sensible tax laws for both corporations and individuals -- NONE of this can happen because our current government has a perfect system of checks and balances to make sure ONLY the wealthy are powerful, to make sure individual votes do not matter.
So I am just bracing myself for an all-out civil war. I still have a good job, hopefully I won't end up one of the 30% unemployed with nothing left to do but fight, hopefully the money I am saving up in the bank will still be worth something in 5 years. That's why I support the protests: I hope they prove me wrong and the entire scenario I just outlined will never happen.
So government workers in the UK think Microsoft Word is exactly the same as virtual paper. There ought to be a law that forces all government employees to write documents by hand-coding HTML tags, but then, I would prefer the government spilled secrets more often.
It's worse than that. Especially here in the US, it's more like "hey you smart guys! We hate and resent you, and our twisted religion says that you're all blasphemers."
Exactly. Our biggest problem is that everyone sees the value in teaching critical thinking and scientific thinking in schools, but people are so afraid of challenging religion that true critical thinking is never taught. No one just comes out and says it: "Religion is bullshit, don't ever accept truth on faith alone. If you really want to know if something is true or not, test it and see for yourself."
No that would be "intollerant". Instead we teach: "Kids, science and critical thinking should ONLY be used in schools, or in situations where critical thinking can make you more money. For everything else, use your favorite religious faith, its your right after all."
Is it really any wonder why science and technological innovation is gradually slowing to a standstill? Most Americans think going to church is important, but far fewer know why science is important at all. People talk about, "we need to do something to get Americans to be more creative, more innovative, and more active in science, but no one has any real solutions. They are full of hot air. Real solutions will come from people who say "Let's just teach everyone why religion is bullshit, and get on with learning real things."
The problem with military innovation is that it is not scientific. Sure, they employ scientists who use the scientific method to innovate, but almost all of that innovation, all of that R&D, stays locked up and is never released to the public. On the occasion that military technology is released to the public, it often does lead to great innovation. But how much of it becomes public? How much of it can be verified by private citizen Scientists? No one knows. Private citizen scientists are left without any knowledge of any scientific advances made by the military. Rather than being scientific and sharing information, they are basically saying, "just give us 70% of all tax revenue, and don't ask questions. Trust us, we will make things better for you, even if you never ever know how or why."
So it is impossible to verify whether or not the military provides us with any benefit at all, apart from a standing army. Anyone who says, "a strong military leads to innovation" isn't saying anything factual, it is merely an article of faith -- one of many articles of faith you must believe in order to call yourself a right-winger.
Us left-wingers are, of course, highly skeptical. It could be for every $1 billion spent on military contracts, our economy sees a $1 trillion boost in wealth due to technological innovation -- but for all we know, for every $1 billion dollars spent only results in a $0.01 boost to our economy. That's the problem with military "innovation" -- everything becomes classified government secrets. That's not innovation at all.
The difficulty lies in finding out the names of applications you have installed, or would like to have installed. I like Unity, but it's biggest shortcoming is that it's really difficult to find a proper list of installed applications. That's where the Windows Start Menu, and similar menu systems, is really helpful.
To find a list of installed applications, open a terminal and type "ls/usr/bin".
All joking aside, Ubuntu's Unity launcher is nice because it gives you a miniature, user-friendly search bar to search for applications and recent files, and I have found it to be quite handy, along with the global menu. Now, Ubuntu has the best of both the Mac (global menu) and windows (the Windows-key-activated launcher) graphical interfaces.
As for TFA and Microsoft, this is a huge mistake. Everyone Windows user EVER is going to hate this. Yet I always rejoice when Microsoft makes another mistake that pisses off its customers and helps their competition. After years of barely-legal anti-competitive behavior, the rate of innovation in the computer software industry just might begin to increase again -- oh wait, unjust patent and copyright litigation. Never mind. Consumer software will never ever innovate, and even our great-grandkids will be using word processors and spreadsheets to do "computery-stuff".
Translation: 85% of scientists either never even think about why science is diametrically opposed to religion, either because they never cared or never bothered to question the foundations of their religion with the same rigor they used in their science, or they are too afraid of loosing their faith to ever even let their mind entertain the possibility that their faith is just a giant scam. Whatever the cause, the end result is that they declare themselves men of both science and faith without realizing just how irreconcilable the two mindsets are.
In religion belief in facts is mandatory, and facts are declared from a podium by clergymen with no burden of proof and no incentive to connection facts to reality, and facts must generally agree with other like-minded clergymen of the same religion, otherwise (uh-oh) religious controversy: schisms appear and new sects are born. Religion is belief in facts for no other reason than for the sake of declaring yourself a member of that religion.
The alternative of religion is science, in which belief is not mandatory but dependent on the experimental evidence, facts are declared not by clergymen at a podium, but by scientists who have performed the experiments, where scientists have every burden of proof, and are under enormous pressure to keep results grounded in reality. The results need not agree with consensus, but if they don't, your results must be replicated in competing research laboratories, not by like-minded scientists of the same "scientific faith", but by peers who know enough about the science to possibly replicate your results. Facts are declared not by fiat, by what you can see, seen with your own eyes, or seen as a blip on a plotted graph of data. And simply believing a fact is not enough to call yourself a scientist.
Science and religion are mutually exclusive, they are polar opposites, there is really no way two things could be any more different. And the fact that very imperfect men can be completely right (scientific) and completely wrong (religious) at the same time is not at all unusual.
Yes you can, ships don't need to go back and forth carrying only containers, nor do they need to go "back and forth", they could go also around the world in one direction. You can load unused containers on ships already traveling to Asia with some useful goods. There may be fewer ships traveling to Asia, but now they can carry more containers and reduce the need for ships coming back empty. Ships running around the world can waste less space carrying empty containers, or can now afford to carry more empty containers the long-way around.
Bullshit, you are so tied-up in political thinking, paranoid that the liberals are out to get you, that you ignore the industrial applications of this material. Carbon sequestration is one real solution to the very real problem of global warming: suck CO2 out of the air, and store it. New and very promising biotechnology has shown that certain species of bacteria can be cultivated to eat the CO2, and using photosynthesis, produce fuel -- turning carbon into gasoline using solar power, this is an incredibly useful invention.
But your head has been up Rush Limbaugh's ass your whole life, so you think that everything in the world is a marketing campaign, and the only reason anyone would ever do or say anything is to market their ideas and profit from the hysteria. After all, the only reason you yourself ever do or say anything is to hype your ideas and make money, that must be true of the "liberals" too, right! (typical right-wing thinking.)
Global warming isn't a fad, and it isn't some left-wing campaign to create demand for green products, as Rush would lead you to believe. It is a scientifically verified, marked increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a correlated increase in average global temperature, and the cause is mostly US and Chinese industry.
With technology to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, we could relieve industry of the cost burden to produce things in less carbon-intensive ways, while not causing devastating, catastrophic changes to the environment. But you, being one of Rush Limbaugh's bitches, lack the imagination to realize even this straight-forward solution to a very real problem, and instead keep whining and bitching about liberals hogging your stuff.
This IS an evolutionary algorithm! His generator is the Mersene twister, his fitness function is the Bloom Field membership test coupled with a string comparison algorithm. He then uses the generator to generate pseudo-random (i.e. not at all random, but difficult to predict) strings and checks them with the fitness function until the correct solution is found.
The "correct" or optimal solution is usually not known in advance when running an evolutionary algorithm. But in this case, we already know the solution (the works of Shakespeare) so this is a really boring bit of news.
What would be interesting news is if a supercomputer existed that had enough computing power to randomly generate all strings of text the lenght of the works of Shakespeare, and iterate through all random strings until the complete works were generated, and this was done in a short amount of time. That would be worthy of slashdot -- but this article is a waste of time.
Furthermore, this is yet another example of confusing things that create-by-evolution with things that create-at-random, a damn persistent bit of confusion that is constantly exploited by the creationism retards.
American banks haven't had any real competition, or had any necessity to improve their consumer-side businesses in over 10 years. In Japan, in every major city I have ever been in, ATM's are all touch-screens. I haven't yet seen any skimmers that are effective on touch screens, not that it would be impossible, just very difficult. At the three largest banks, customers who pay extra monthly fees get a thumb-print identification features that requires a thumb print in addition to a PIN code.
That old stereotype about Japan doing everything America does but better seems to be true in this case.
Chinese defense contractors announced today that they have made a series of tremendous advancements in submarine, missile, and nuclear power plant component technology.
@elrous Exactly. At first I thought this might have been stuxnet accidentally spread to Asia. But already it is starting to look like it may have been a separate, highly targeted attack. Guess which country hates Japan and has the capabilities to carry out cyber warfare? Hint: it's not North Korea (though North Korea does hate Japan).
Frankly, I'm sick of all the bullshit from both sides. I've got a grant-whore "environmental scientist" (when did that even become a hard science?) screaming in one ear that we're all going to die if we don't go all-solar/all-wind in the next twenty years. In the other ear, I've got Jesusy McAnnRaynd telling me that Exxon only wants to give me love and flowers, and would never, ever hurt me. And frankly, I just want to punch BOTH of them at this point.
Both sides have taken to over-exaggerating and over-hyping every bit of evidence they touch. And I've come to distrust them both.
@elrous
So you're saying if my policies cause major social problems that harm everyone, and everyone is pissed off at me, then all I have to do to get everyone to stop caring about what I did is to overly politicize it? Make it look like a highly partisan issue with bad-guys on both sides? Get people to say "hey, I hate both parties, I trust neither side," and turn away in disgust? That's all I have to do? Really? Then you'll stop paying attention? Cool!!!
You have just guaranteed nothing will ever change for the better, and I can get away with murder if I want to. And if anything, now I want to spend even more money on political propaganda, making absolutely EVERY issue highly politicized so no one will ever again notice anything that the wealthy and powerful do to screw ordinary people.
This completely explains the state of affairs we have right now in government and politics. Thanks for being an ignorant retard, jackoff.
My AU phone was useless for about 12 hours after the quake, but I am right in the middle of the city with millions of people trying to make calls -- that or they deliberately cut civilian bands to make room for emergency response. I can only speculate.
Even in north-eastern Yokohama near Kawasaki, right next to Tokyo (not exactly a suburban place) the Softbank service sucked. For 2 freaking years I had a habit of running outside with my cell phone to a spot I knew had better reception as soon as I received a call. I was the worlds largest Apple fan-boy at the time and was dying to buy the iPhone, but had to wait a year for them to release it in Japan, but they went with Softbank. As soon as my Softbank contract ended, I went to AU, and it gets reception EVERYWHERE which is so nice I won't even think about buying an iPhone, no matter how much I wanted one.
Fortunately, I have switched to Linux, and don't even look at Apple's stuff anymore. If this is any indication of how Apple is going to do business, I would hold out on buying any stock in that company. Apple is at the top, it can only go down from there.
As for TFA, I like the idea of a DC meta-grid, I just hope they get someone more competent to construct it than anyone who set-up the Softbank network or anyone from Tepoco. But Since Tepco is basically a government sanctioned illegal monopoly, they will get the government contract, and cut costs, and pocket the savings, and taxes will be raised for a sub-par power grid that is no benefit to anyone but to line corporate coffers once again -- that's what always happens in this country.
A good database engines already has type checking, and so as long as your query language is type-safe and respects the types built-in to the database engine, then your query language will also be type safe. So all you need to do is write a library that can execute queries in a language like Haskell or Scala which makes use of static type checking, and you have got statically type-checked database queries.
Haskell has had its own database query library for years now, which works with several back-end databases including SQLite and MySQL.
Most connectors have two important factors determining whether or not they will be successful in the market place: (1) functionality, and (2) adoptability. If wide-spread adoption is important to making it successful, why would they bother patenting it? If other makers can't use this connector, this will disincentive people from buying the iPhone and going with a competing maker that sticks with the standards. Further, it will piss-off their more loyal customers who now are forced to buy head phones that only work with the iPhone or iPod, unless they want to stick with the pair that comes with the device when you buy it.
Unless they intend to make the patents available royalty-free, this connector is dead before it got off the ground.
I had a great idea once, but it turned out that implementing it required assembling numerous parts, 160 of which were each similar enough to about 160 different patents. I am confident that if I had opted to fight the patents in court, I could have defeated 159, if not all of the patent infringment claims, but I ran of money to pay the lawyers. Now I'm in debt, and my idea hasn't made me any money or even been offered capital investment (because no one wants to touch me for fear of the cost litigation).
Full disclaimer, I am making this up, but it's still totally true.
We're not in a "post-idea" world, we are in a world where ideas are heavily discouraged from being capitalized-on. Unless, that is, you work for a major corporation where your idea can be arbitrarily exploited by upper management with minimal compensation or remittance, arbitrarily have its development canceled and locked in a safe until after you have retired, or arbitrarily marketed to the wrong audience only to be declared that your idea was actually never very profitable. And by arbitrarily, I mean "depending on what Steve Jobs is doing today."
Slashdot Mirror
16,000 people, out of a population of about 5.4 million, that's about a 0.3% chances they got him, or perhaps one of his family's personal information.
Well, he is using MacOS. If he were using a real operating system, he might have access to more authentic random numbers from /dev/random.
But what an incredibly ugly hack. If it's so damned important to you, just buy a $20 USB-FM receiver, tune into the cosmic microwave background, and record and hash the audio stream from that. Or point your webcam at a bubbles generated from a fish-tank bubbler and hash the video stream. There are so many easy ways to get moderately random numbers, that would certainly be much more random and easier to program than parsing the not-so-random stuff from tcpdump.
He probably never even bothered to query Google for natural sources of randomness, or he may have run accross LavaRnd.
Please, everyone, don't even think about taking TFA seriously.
The OS+hypervisor has a larger attack surface than the OS alone, period. Unless you can prove your hypervisor is un-hackable (don't make me laugh), a virtualized system is less secure.
Even Windows, at the kernel level, is quite secure, and should be more secure than using it with a hypervisor; even a hypervisor made by Microsoft for Windows (or should I say "especially a hypervisor made by Microsoft") will be less secure than the OS alone.
Face it, most modern operating systems are secure enough to run on metal without ever allowing unauthorized access to hardware. The real hacks to worry about are at the application level and the human level, and virtualization has nothing to say about isolation there.
If Crosby were making the case that virtualization makes it easier to manage operating system instances and thus reduce human error in cloud-computing services, I would agree with him. But isolation provided by a hypervisor will never be more secure than a properly designed and tested OS running on metal.
The reason software is bigger today is not necessarily because it does more. Think about byte alignments, and instruction sizes. What if a program can compile to some 20,000 instructions. What if your CPU can represent entire instructions as a single byte? What if some instructions require 5 bytes? If, on average, you have say, 2.5 bytes, then you will need 500,000 bytes of space to store 20,000 instructions. If you need a solid 4 bytes per instruction, then you need 800,000 bytes to store 20,000 instructions. It all depends on the CPU and the optimizations used.
So writing a computer virus could involve either hacking the software running on the bacteria NAND circuits... or could involve writing a bacteriophage that attacks the circutiry itself.
Or what if a bacteria learned how to colonize and take-over a human brain? Just like the Borg!!! I'm in your brain, hacking your dreams.
As if it wasn't bad enough worrying about computer viruses, now we have to worry about computer bacteria too, and computer bacteria viruses (bacteriophage hacking).
Oh well, this is still cool as hell.
"It's a T-1000." Guns and bombs have checmicals, moving parts. It doesn't work that way. But it can form solid metal shapes, like knives, and other stabbing weapons.
Despite all of Google's privacy regressions (which by the way, are not nearly as bad as Facebook's) they have done a good job of shaking-up the establishment by making a lot of information free and easily available. This makes them the enemy of the establishment, that losely-knit group of corporate/government/media who are not necessarily working together, but all operate on the same corrupt principles.
I am guessing that Google doesn't do a good enough job of obeying these principles. Now, a tax-dodge which the IRS tends to overlook when other corporations do it, is being used as an excuse to go after Google.
This is a warning to Google. The establishment is saying: act like a real (corrupt) corporation or be destroyed by our gang of lawyers, politicians, and federal investigators.
That's because the Tea Party doesn't defecate on their cars. Daily Mail [dailymail.co.uk]
Fuck you and your right-wing propaganda machine.
It's because Fox News was both defending the Tea Party, and keeping them in line. Any imagery of cops beating down on Tea Party protesters would only be fodder for their anti-government (anti-Obama) talking points.
Who's defending Occupy Wall Street? Is the "Left Wing" Media (CNN, MSNBC, NPR) running 24-hour news coverage on how unfair the police have treated the protesters on Wall Street, in the same way that Fox hyped and gave coverage to the Tea Party? No. Nobody is defending Occupy Wall Street. There are no buses paid for by Koch industries, giving them free food, transportation, and otherwise keeping them orderly.
The so-called "Left-Wing media" doesn't exist, it is a fictional demon invented by Fox news and Talk Radio to make the ignorant masses of right-wing sympathizers believe they are a repressed minority fighting against a greater evil (the "liberals"). But no "left-wing media" even exists, and anyone who thinks it does exist is a severely deluded puppet of the state/wealthy-elite. For this reason, occupy Wall Street WILL FAIL: there is no solidarity or sympathy for people who are unemployed or otherwise abused by the system. There is still hope that things will get better. But things will not get better. If Obama is re-elected, he will not solve the problem at all. If a Republican is elected, he will only make the current problems worse.
10% unemployment and rising. If this goes on much longer (and it will), that 10% will grow to 20%, maybe 30%. Then the 30% WILL loose their last fleeting trace of hope. When that happens, you will no longer see 30% unemployment, you will see 30% of all Americans become suicidal. You will see 30% of Americans so desperate for food that no amount violent force by the police or military will keep that 30% in-line. Their lives can get no worse, and they will all die fighting for freedom, and in the process, take as many of the 1% down with them as they can in the process.
This is one of the last chances for a peaceful resolution. The problem is, the resolution is impossible: campaign finance reform, individual tax equality with corporations, solid social safety-nets for the elderly and incapacitated, sensible tax laws for both corporations and individuals -- NONE of this can happen because our current government has a perfect system of checks and balances to make sure ONLY the wealthy are powerful, to make sure individual votes do not matter.
So I am just bracing myself for an all-out civil war. I still have a good job, hopefully I won't end up one of the 30% unemployed with nothing left to do but fight, hopefully the money I am saving up in the bank will still be worth something in 5 years. That's why I support the protests: I hope they prove me wrong and the entire scenario I just outlined will never happen.
So government workers in the UK think Microsoft Word is exactly the same as virtual paper. There ought to be a law that forces all government employees to write documents by hand-coding HTML tags, but then, I would prefer the government spilled secrets more often.
It's worse than that. Especially here in the US, it's more like "hey you smart guys! We hate and resent you, and our twisted religion says that you're all blasphemers."
Exactly. Our biggest problem is that everyone sees the value in teaching critical thinking and scientific thinking in schools, but people are so afraid of challenging religion that true critical thinking is never taught. No one just comes out and says it: "Religion is bullshit, don't ever accept truth on faith alone. If you really want to know if something is true or not, test it and see for yourself."
No that would be "intollerant". Instead we teach: "Kids, science and critical thinking should ONLY be used in schools, or in situations where critical thinking can make you more money. For everything else, use your favorite religious faith, its your right after all."
Is it really any wonder why science and technological innovation is gradually slowing to a standstill? Most Americans think going to church is important, but far fewer know why science is important at all. People talk about, "we need to do something to get Americans to be more creative, more innovative, and more active in science, but no one has any real solutions. They are full of hot air. Real solutions will come from people who say "Let's just teach everyone why religion is bullshit, and get on with learning real things."
The problem with military innovation is that it is not scientific. Sure, they employ scientists who use the scientific method to innovate, but almost all of that innovation, all of that R&D, stays locked up and is never released to the public. On the occasion that military technology is released to the public, it often does lead to great innovation. But how much of it becomes public? How much of it can be verified by private citizen Scientists? No one knows. Private citizen scientists are left without any knowledge of any scientific advances made by the military. Rather than being scientific and sharing information, they are basically saying, "just give us 70% of all tax revenue, and don't ask questions. Trust us, we will make things better for you, even if you never ever know how or why."
So it is impossible to verify whether or not the military provides us with any benefit at all, apart from a standing army. Anyone who says, "a strong military leads to innovation" isn't saying anything factual, it is merely an article of faith -- one of many articles of faith you must believe in order to call yourself a right-winger.
Us left-wingers are, of course, highly skeptical. It could be for every $1 billion spent on military contracts, our economy sees a $1 trillion boost in wealth due to technological innovation -- but for all we know, for every $1 billion dollars spent only results in a $0.01 boost to our economy. That's the problem with military "innovation" -- everything becomes classified government secrets. That's not innovation at all.
The difficulty lies in finding out the names of applications you have installed, or would like to have installed. I like Unity, but it's biggest shortcoming is that it's really difficult to find a proper list of installed applications. That's where the Windows Start Menu, and similar menu systems, is really helpful.
To find a list of installed applications, open a terminal and type "ls /usr/bin".
All joking aside, Ubuntu's Unity launcher is nice because it gives you a miniature, user-friendly search bar to search for applications and recent files, and I have found it to be quite handy, along with the global menu. Now, Ubuntu has the best of both the Mac (global menu) and windows (the Windows-key-activated launcher) graphical interfaces.
As for TFA and Microsoft, this is a huge mistake. Everyone Windows user EVER is going to hate this. Yet I always rejoice when Microsoft makes another mistake that pisses off its customers and helps their competition. After years of barely-legal anti-competitive behavior, the rate of innovation in the computer software industry just might begin to increase again -- oh wait, unjust patent and copyright litigation. Never mind. Consumer software will never ever innovate, and even our great-grandkids will be using word processors and spreadsheets to do "computery-stuff".
Translation: 85% of scientists either never even think about why science is diametrically opposed to religion, either because they never cared or never bothered to question the foundations of their religion with the same rigor they used in their science, or they are too afraid of loosing their faith to ever even let their mind entertain the possibility that their faith is just a giant scam. Whatever the cause, the end result is that they declare themselves men of both science and faith without realizing just how irreconcilable the two mindsets are.
In religion belief in facts is mandatory, and facts are declared from a podium by clergymen with no burden of proof and no incentive to connection facts to reality, and facts must generally agree with other like-minded clergymen of the same religion, otherwise (uh-oh) religious controversy: schisms appear and new sects are born. Religion is belief in facts for no other reason than for the sake of declaring yourself a member of that religion.
The alternative of religion is science, in which belief is not mandatory but dependent on the experimental evidence, facts are declared not by clergymen at a podium, but by scientists who have performed the experiments, where scientists have every burden of proof, and are under enormous pressure to keep results grounded in reality. The results need not agree with consensus, but if they don't, your results must be replicated in competing research laboratories, not by like-minded scientists of the same "scientific faith", but by peers who know enough about the science to possibly replicate your results. Facts are declared not by fiat, by what you can see, seen with your own eyes, or seen as a blip on a plotted graph of data. And simply believing a fact is not enough to call yourself a scientist.
Science and religion are mutually exclusive, they are polar opposites, there is really no way two things could be any more different. And the fact that very imperfect men can be completely right (scientific) and completely wrong (religious) at the same time is not at all unusual.
Yes you can, ships don't need to go back and forth carrying only containers, nor do they need to go "back and forth", they could go also around the world in one direction. You can load unused containers on ships already traveling to Asia with some useful goods. There may be fewer ships traveling to Asia, but now they can carry more containers and reduce the need for ships coming back empty. Ships running around the world can waste less space carrying empty containers, or can now afford to carry more empty containers the long-way around.
Bullshit, you are so tied-up in political thinking, paranoid that the liberals are out to get you, that you ignore the industrial applications of this material. Carbon sequestration is one real solution to the very real problem of global warming: suck CO2 out of the air, and store it. New and very promising biotechnology has shown that certain species of bacteria can be cultivated to eat the CO2, and using photosynthesis, produce fuel -- turning carbon into gasoline using solar power, this is an incredibly useful invention.
But your head has been up Rush Limbaugh's ass your whole life, so you think that everything in the world is a marketing campaign, and the only reason anyone would ever do or say anything is to market their ideas and profit from the hysteria. After all, the only reason you yourself ever do or say anything is to hype your ideas and make money, that must be true of the "liberals" too, right! (typical right-wing thinking.)
Global warming isn't a fad, and it isn't some left-wing campaign to create demand for green products, as Rush would lead you to believe. It is a scientifically verified, marked increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and a correlated increase in average global temperature, and the cause is mostly US and Chinese industry.
With technology to reduce carbon in the atmosphere, we could relieve industry of the cost burden to produce things in less carbon-intensive ways, while not causing devastating, catastrophic changes to the environment. But you, being one of Rush Limbaugh's bitches, lack the imagination to realize even this straight-forward solution to a very real problem, and instead keep whining and bitching about liberals hogging your stuff.
This IS an evolutionary algorithm! His generator is the Mersene twister, his fitness function is the Bloom Field membership test coupled with a string comparison algorithm. He then uses the generator to generate pseudo-random (i.e. not at all random, but difficult to predict) strings and checks them with the fitness function until the correct solution is found.
The "correct" or optimal solution is usually not known in advance when running an evolutionary algorithm. But in this case, we already know the solution (the works of Shakespeare) so this is a really boring bit of news.
What would be interesting news is if a supercomputer existed that had enough computing power to randomly generate all strings of text the lenght of the works of Shakespeare, and iterate through all random strings until the complete works were generated, and this was done in a short amount of time. That would be worthy of slashdot -- but this article is a waste of time.
Furthermore, this is yet another example of confusing things that create-by-evolution with things that create-at-random, a damn persistent bit of confusion that is constantly exploited by the creationism retards.
American banks haven't had any real competition, or had any necessity to improve their consumer-side businesses in over 10 years. In Japan, in every major city I have ever been in, ATM's are all touch-screens. I haven't yet seen any skimmers that are effective on touch screens, not that it would be impossible, just very difficult. At the three largest banks, customers who pay extra monthly fees get a thumb-print identification features that requires a thumb print in addition to a PIN code.
That old stereotype about Japan doing everything America does but better seems to be true in this case.
Chinese defense contractors announced today that they have made a series of tremendous advancements in submarine, missile, and nuclear power plant component technology.
@elrous
Exactly. At first I thought this might have been stuxnet accidentally spread to Asia. But already it is starting to look like it may have been a separate, highly targeted attack. Guess which country hates Japan and has the capabilities to carry out cyber warfare? Hint: it's not North Korea (though North Korea does hate Japan).
Frankly, I'm sick of all the bullshit from both sides. I've got a grant-whore "environmental scientist" (when did that even become a hard science?) screaming in one ear that we're all going to die if we don't go all-solar/all-wind in the next twenty years. In the other ear, I've got Jesusy McAnnRaynd telling me that Exxon only wants to give me love and flowers, and would never, ever hurt me. And frankly, I just want to punch BOTH of them at this point. Both sides have taken to over-exaggerating and over-hyping every bit of evidence they touch. And I've come to distrust them both.
@elrous
So you're saying if my policies cause major social problems that harm everyone, and everyone is pissed off at me, then all I have to do to get everyone to stop caring about what I did is to overly politicize it? Make it look like a highly partisan issue with bad-guys on both sides? Get people to say "hey, I hate both parties, I trust neither side," and turn away in disgust? That's all I have to do? Really? Then you'll stop paying attention? Cool!!!
You have just guaranteed nothing will ever change for the better, and I can get away with murder if I want to. And if anything, now I want to spend even more money on political propaganda, making absolutely EVERY issue highly politicized so no one will ever again notice anything that the wealthy and powerful do to screw ordinary people.
This completely explains the state of affairs we have right now in government and politics. Thanks for being an ignorant retard, jackoff.
"Evidence-Based Medicine" is redundant. Medicine is "evidence-based" by definition. If it is not "evidence-based" it is not "medicine".
My AU phone was useless for about 12 hours after the quake, but I am right in the middle of the city with millions of people trying to make calls -- that or they deliberately cut civilian bands to make room for emergency response. I can only speculate.
Even in north-eastern Yokohama near Kawasaki, right next to Tokyo (not exactly a suburban place) the Softbank service sucked. For 2 freaking years I had a habit of running outside with my cell phone to a spot I knew had better reception as soon as I received a call. I was the worlds largest Apple fan-boy at the time and was dying to buy the iPhone, but had to wait a year for them to release it in Japan, but they went with Softbank. As soon as my Softbank contract ended, I went to AU, and it gets reception EVERYWHERE which is so nice I won't even think about buying an iPhone, no matter how much I wanted one.
Fortunately, I have switched to Linux, and don't even look at Apple's stuff anymore. If this is any indication of how Apple is going to do business, I would hold out on buying any stock in that company. Apple is at the top, it can only go down from there.
As for TFA, I like the idea of a DC meta-grid, I just hope they get someone more competent to construct it than anyone who set-up the Softbank network or anyone from Tepoco. But Since Tepco is basically a government sanctioned illegal monopoly, they will get the government contract, and cut costs, and pocket the savings, and taxes will be raised for a sub-par power grid that is no benefit to anyone but to line corporate coffers once again -- that's what always happens in this country.
This is nothing new.
A good database engines already has type checking, and so as long as your query language is type-safe and respects the types built-in to the database engine, then your query language will also be type safe. So all you need to do is write a library that can execute queries in a language like Haskell or Scala which makes use of static type checking, and you have got statically type-checked database queries.
Haskell has had its own database query library for years now, which works with several back-end databases including SQLite and MySQL.
Most connectors have two important factors determining whether or not they will be successful in the market place: (1) functionality, and (2) adoptability. If wide-spread adoption is important to making it successful, why would they bother patenting it? If other makers can't use this connector, this will disincentive people from buying the iPhone and going with a competing maker that sticks with the standards. Further, it will piss-off their more loyal customers who now are forced to buy head phones that only work with the iPhone or iPod, unless they want to stick with the pair that comes with the device when you buy it. Unless they intend to make the patents available royalty-free, this connector is dead before it got off the ground.
I had a great idea once, but it turned out that implementing it required assembling numerous parts, 160 of which were each similar enough to about 160 different patents. I am confident that if I had opted to fight the patents in court, I could have defeated 159, if not all of the patent infringment claims, but I ran of money to pay the lawyers. Now I'm in debt, and my idea hasn't made me any money or even been offered capital investment (because no one wants to touch me for fear of the cost litigation).
Full disclaimer, I am making this up, but it's still totally true.
We're not in a "post-idea" world, we are in a world where ideas are heavily discouraged from being capitalized-on. Unless, that is, you work for a major corporation where your idea can be arbitrarily exploited by upper management with minimal compensation or remittance, arbitrarily have its development canceled and locked in a safe until after you have retired, or arbitrarily marketed to the wrong audience only to be declared that your idea was actually never very profitable. And by arbitrarily, I mean "depending on what Steve Jobs is doing today."