haven't we seen articles saying that bots are now more likely to be able to beat captchas than humans are? I know I usually have to reload many captcha images 2-3 times before I can find one that I can guess at with any likelyhood of success.
In fact such bots have been created, tested, proven, boxed, and sold.
Hell, for only $1.39 per 1000 solved captchas, we could spend as much as a cup of coffee and never have to try reading those annoying blurs again! Sadly I don't suspect it actually would work like that for us non-spammers:{
Speaking of spammers, I have a feeling I'll be needing to update my filters to preemptively drop email from any TLD more than 3 characters. Sorry dot-info owners, but you can blame ICANN for this one.
I was also going to recommend DicePool but they appear out of business now:{ They had the "odd" dice set cheaper, as well as tens of thousands of normal polyhedral sets, and awesome deals on bulk dice (ie dice by the pound)
Is this a typical punishment for this kind of crime?
Yes, it's fairly typical for the government fine.
In cases like this there are two transfers of money. One to the government, and one to the victims of the crime.
Generally the fine that goes to the government is in the 2-3 digit range, occasionally 4. Rarely is there ever a fine at the $10,000 level or above that goes to the government or courts.
The next fine that will happen goes to the victims. This however will likely be huge, since he will have to pay for both medical bills, pain and suffering, and other compensation (loss of work and future work, loss of ability to be self sufficient, etc)
The medical bills alone could easily be in to the hundreds of thousands of dollars in the US, but all the rest added to that could easily bring it to a million dollars or more. This part of the case hasn't happened yet so we don't know. Our legal system moves pretty slow too for civil cases unfortunately.
Personally I feel this is a good thing. If the government took all of this mans money, there would be nothing left over to go to the victims. A lot of people are too poor to pay the victims anyway, which will result in jail time for them, which does not help result in them making a lot of money to send to the victims still. But the most money needs to go to the victims where it belongs, not to the government. What money does go to the government for the court costs however should be from the criminal, not the victim, so it's not unreasonable to have both fines this way.
No, it will stil be smoke and mirrors. Magicians are pretty clever at making impossible things appear to happen, tricking a human into believing a machine is sentient is no different. Look up "Chinese room".
The problem of proving a machine is or is not sentient is actually very very old. At least 10,000 years old.
After all, can you prove to me you are sentient or conscious?
And I don't mean that as an insult. I can't prove that I am sentient or conscious to you either. But if it is accepted that all humans are sentient, there is still the fact any one individual can not prove they are, let alone we as in humanity can't prove anyone else is.
Can we show even a lower species is sentient? I believe my pet dog is as sentient as I am, as well as is intelligent although not as much so as a human. I can not prove this at all however.
The same problem exists with software. A program created by a human will always have the Chinese Room issue at hand, and I agree would be extremely unlikely (and definitely not at all required) to be sentient simply to hold a conversation in a way to sound plausibly human.
The flip side to that would be YouTube comments. From that text alone, I'm sure YouTube only has about 100 actual users and a few million bots running around pretending:P Not all humans could pass the turning test themselves!
But taken to the logical extreme, say we have a computer that is capable and powerful enough to run a simulation of our universe, with all laws of physics accounted for (a trick we still can't pull off, as we do not know all the laws of nature yet, despite how accurate and detailed our nuclear simulations have proven to be)
Simulating a meter cubed block of universe, containing an exact replica of your brain, would be equally as sentient as your current brain is within our matching non-simulated universe. Would that simulation be sentient? I would say, no more than you are right now. Some might say that is a 'yes', others might say that is a 'no'. But either way, that is currently our best bet for truly sentient and conscious software.
As for our current standing?
- We can currently simulate most aspects of reality, out of the subset of aspects we know of, down to subatomic levels in a large enough area to perform nuclear simulations that match perfectly to the real thing. - We do not know enough about the interaction of atoms within the human (or any) brain to recreate one within a simulation (or the real universe either for that matter) however we know it is possible because it happens many times a day as new babies are born. - The brain alone would not be enough. Enough sensory 'emulation' from a simulated environment would also be required. A child born and locked into a dark and silent 3x3x3 box with a feeding tube for years will not come out "human" by most non-genetic definitions. - The above also requires simulating environment, enough so to at least emulate a functional body and world to explore both in. - Even if some day possible, this is not Creating AI, this is Copying AI (Or would that be copying just I?)
Personally I think, despite our progression with computing technology and knowledge levels of both the universe as well as organic brains, we are so far from the level that would be required to even test concepts out, let alone the entire system, that any current test today is a joke. It will be even longer after that before computers can do it all fast enough to approach simulating in real time. Nuclear simulations spend many many months and a great many resources simulating what in reality would be at best a couple seconds.
If nothing stops our progression, this all should be very possible some day. The laws of nature do not exclude it as possible, and in fact what we know so far shows it to be possible. Aka what we call "in theory." Unfortunately for AI researchers, "some day" is likely not going to be any time they or their family line will still exist in.
Re:It's not just specialization, there is also fea
on
Where's HAL 9000?
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· Score: 2
Our closest apps to AI are Siri and whatever the Android voice app is. All they do is retrieve information. Same as a google search.
I would say the closest "app" to what you describe, that would still fall under the category of specialized AI, would be Watson. It too is a huge information retrieval system, but specifically designed to play Jeopardy and play it well. It already bested the top two human players.
Of course it is still only a specialized AI engine, no where NEAR expert AI, and it most certainly does not think. Hell, it can't even read visually, see, hear, or a lot of other things required to truly play a game of Jeopardy. But it is leaps and bounds more complex and advanced than Siri currently is!
To me, Siri is nothing more than a good voice recognition app combined with Wolfram Alpha. I don't mean to be belittling Siri in general, but in this comparison it is hard not to.
This is probably why the implementation date is slipping. The ISPs might be waking up to the shitstorm that comes when they roll this out.
I wonder how much government bailout money we will need to pay in extra taxes once the ISPs lose the large majority of their customers and income...
If supposedly 50% of people pirate just software, that alone will result in the ISPs only having 50% of their current income. Throw music and movies into the mix, and it would not surprise me if that number was over 75%.
That's a hell of a lot of income to willingly refuse to take...
No *woosh* at all, I just wanted you to admit that first.
So now that you believe in all religions as possible, you are going to hell (or the equivalent) according to all of them.
Religion A states if you believe in any other god but theirs, you will go to hell. You state you do, so hell bound you are. Religion B states if you believe in any other god but theirs, you will go to purgatory. You state you do, so purgatory bound you are. Religion C states if you believe in any other god, you will be stoned to death. You state you do, so you better keep quiet about that or other followers will try to murder you.
You also equally believe in unicorns and fairies, since that too is impossible to know or prove. Anyone who believes in unicorns and fairies is clearly delusional.
Definately not a *woosh* on anyone but possibly you, except I think you do know how ridiculous you sound with such claims, so I'm guessing it isn't over your head one bit.
The only rational option when it comes to Gods is: If God wants me to do or not do something, it's up to God to let me know, stop me, or force me. Lacking that, the only assumption that can be made is I am not involved with Gods plans, and so those plans should not concern me. If they don't concern me, there is no need to adjust my own plans for life around them.
And before you say it, no I do not consider a book re-written hundreds of times by MAN to be the word of any God. A god, to fit the definition, would not need a book to let their wishes known. They would have an infinite number of means to assure we know without a doubt, if that was their goal. Either god exists and doesn't care what we do, or god does not exist and it again doesn't matter what we do.
We have a name for people who hear and see things that no one else hears or sees because they are proven to not be there. Delusional.
I also see no reason to take into account any opinion or thoughts you might have, seeing as you admit you already broke the highest commandments of all the religions you feel are equally true. If you can't keep yourself behaving properly to go to a heaven, then why would I want to follow you?
It won't help solve our current environmental, economic of political problems, will it?
Neither does posting to Slashdot, or most all of the things you do on a daily basis. We still do them anyway.
Knowledge for the sake of knowing is great, but what will this information help us achieve?
It will achieve knowledge for the sake of knowing (Which yes is great.) That's it. That is enough reason alone.
There is no reason to poopoo on another persons research topic, simply because it does not aid in the fairly short list of reasons you state as worthwhile. Especially so when you are just as guilty as the rest of us in "wasting" our time on not those things.
All sorts of styles, displays, and interpretations. Some are more pricey than others, but I'd say every last one is a piece of art more than a plain watch.
They are all limited edition, so if you wait a few months they will have in new models, but at the same time some current models will be discontinued. So if you find something you really like, don't put it off.
Did this malware hit the DSL modem web-config page from the Internet to change it's DNS settings? Or is this Windows malware that, once infecting a PC on the LAN, used that PC to hit the web-config page?
One would assume the web-server in the DSL modem doesn't answer on the public interface or IP, but clearly they fucked up the security to start with so that's not an assumption I want to make.
If this malware hit it from the Internet, then it would be trivial for the ISP to do the same exact thing to put the settings back. The ISP even has legit and legal access to their customer premise equipment, so it wouldn't be illegal or labeled as "hacking" in that case.
Even if the modem web-config only answers to the LAN IP, and it was an infected Windows box that automatically reconfigured the router... wouldn't there be a password of some sort?
And why doesn't the ISPs maintain a "maintenance" subnet where they CAN access the DSL modem?
All the ISP needs to do is add a route to their core routers for the old DNS server IPs that will be going down soon, and redirect those packets to their internal DNS servers.
Failing That, the ISP can log any customers that access the hijacked DNS IPs, build up a list, and mail out a letter to them postal style. If they don't read their ISPs snail-mail, then they deserve whatever outage they get. Believe me, once service goes down, they WILL be calling the ISP. I can understand wanting to lessen the massive amounts of calls they are expecting on the 9th, but in order to lessen that flood they will need to do Something. Anything. Anything except the nothing they seem to be doing.
Just setup a web site with all the info they need, which can be accessed with an IP alone. Give that to them on the phone. Include both the address and IP in the snail mail letter. Hell, at that point the ISP can include a link that when clicked will connect to the internal IP of the router and submit new DNS settings in the GET request. A small amount of javascript will handle if a POST is needed. There is clearly no password on the web interface to deal with, or they wouldn't have this problem from the malware in the first place, so this should be trivial to fix semi-automated, and likely totally automated with a bit more work.
This sounds more like laziness and ineptness rather than any technical reason for fixing the problem.
Infrared? Not exactly wi-fi. You'd have to be in the same room as the router for this to work. I don't see many practical applications.
No terahertz is not exactly wifi. Both are blocked by thick metal for example, neither are blocked by wood glass or plastic.
In fact the only things I know of that will block terahertz which wifi goes through are water and bone. If your walls are made of water or bone, then yes you will need to stay with gigahertz frequencies:P
What does it matter how easy the code was to write? And if it was so easy why did google need to copy it?
It matters a lot. Google didn't copy anything, Google WROTE IT.
Yes, an employee at Google is the one that wrote that exact bit of code, and sent it to Sun to put in Java. He then had to write the same function for Android, and since it is the same person with the same brain, he wrote the same code.
Or put another way, you used the words "easy to write" just now, and you have used those words before in your life. You are stating you plagiarized those words, from yourself. Which is a very stupid claim for you to make.
Exactly. Standard procedure is to close down the roads and block off the intersections, so it doesn't matter if the lights are green or not since the convoy will be the only ones on that road.
After the mess that makes out of traffic changing the traffic lights for the few minutes needed is only a minor disrupt to traffic, no more than if an ambulance or police vehicle had their lights/siren running and needed to run light.
This seems like the least annoying method compared to ones used in the past.
We will see drunks piss on a cable, then their next of kin sue the station and everyone else upstream.
These problems have already been solved.
The Japanese fast charging standard CHAdeMO has both power delivery as well as a CAN bus data connection in the "nozzle". A communications channel is opened, and a diagnostic run on the battery system to determine there are no problems before power is even engaged to the pump.
Shorting out the CAN data lines will do nothing. Unless your piss can speak binary using the right protocol and sending the right responses up the line, there will be no power to harm you.
There is no reason to NOT include such a basic safety feature, which is always the case for any such potentially dangerous machinery designed to be fully self serviced by the below average consumer.
Gas stations are already under heavy video surveillance to prevent both vandalism and theft of service. This will not change.
And as for people who run unlocked wireless routers and let anybody in the neighborhood utilize their bandwidth, I have zero sympathy.
I'm glad to hear you say that! When I let myself into your home while you are at work, you just accepted all the blame for anything and everything I do!
After all, people who can't properly secure their front door or windows such as yourself, we have zero sympathy for."
Perhaps you should fix that problem and install a 6" 40 bolt security door, and cement all your fragile shaterable glass windows up. Such lax security on your part would require you to turn yourself in to the police after I let myself in, take all your unsecured stuff, and use your unsecured telephone to call in a hostage situation.
Most people would simply blame ME for the crime I committed, but not hard asses like us, right?
Further, the lack of NAT is something that has held back IPv6.
Whaa? Why?
Instead of using a private IP block behind a NAT box, just use a real IP block and a stateful firewall box. Identical effect as NAT would have, with the bonus that you are guaranteed no other machine on the internet will be on a private network with the same IPs you use so VPN tunnels won't break.
You also gain the bonus feature that with a single config line change, you can put one of your private "NATed" machines out in your DMZ and don't have to reconfigure anything else but one entry on the firewall. No renumbering, no rerouting, no vlan adjustments, no NAT/PAT forwarding exceptions.
Why on earth you would want to cripple your network so badly when a stateful firewall will give an identical effect?
If you find and watch the BBC documentary "Richard Hammonds Journey To The Centre of the Planet", he visits a scientist performing experiments with turtles and magnetic fields. (Specifically, towards the end of part 1 of the 2 parts)
They had a turtle velcroed in a vest so they could anchor it to a swing arm and let it move freely in a tank of water with full control of its flippers. The tank had boards along the outside with coiled wires which could induce a magnetic field.
By flipping the polarity and changing the magnetic field, the turtle would turn around and swim towards the other side of the tank.
The earths magnetic field is in fact many times larger than the earth itself, and while our compasses only show direction along the field lines, its possible to get your bearing north/south by the strength of the field. The field is quite uneven as well, so while it might not be possible to perform GPS levels of navigation, the strength of the field can indicate which area you are in along all directions. Turtles use this to return to their birth place as you say, and this has been proven both by observation and by experiments.
Well worth the watch if you can locate the documentary.
They didn't mind the bad press over suing a 12 year old child OR a 80 year old grandfather for only 'several' movies, so we know it's not the age part that did it. (source)
They also don't mind sending threatening letters to the military asking them to crack down on their own troops for them, so it isn't the American troops away from home part that did it either. (source)
They didn't mind suing people for downloading movies for personal use and no profits involved, so we know that isn't what did it either. (source)
This is a complete reversal of past policy on all counts!
My personal guess is that the lawsuit is already in the works, and they requested the court seal the details so the press doesn't get word of it. Then they release this announcement to try and look like they are being good guys. There can't be any other possibility. The Grinchs heart growing 3 sizes only happens in the movies.
Be honest people, even if you're a fan, put down the kool-aid and admit that Linux fights with you FROM DAY ONE.
To be more fair, it isn't Linux specifically, but the GUI in desktop distros.
I have numerous Debian servers running (Not a single one with a desktop however) and never have problems. It's only when you throw Gnome or KDE into the mix that I want to commit a multiple homicide slash suicide.
dissy@s3:~$ w
18:26:16 up 766 days, 23:06, 1 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Before anyone says it, that (and all my other) system is FULLY up to date, both userland and kernel patches, as of Wednesday evening. (Ksplice is the most epic win since virtualization) That reboot 2 years ago followed an almost 3 year uptime, and only happened due to power rearrangement issues and replacing its UPSs. The reboot before that was after installation from optical media. Those two reboots are all that system has ever had in the past almost 5 years of running rock solid stable.
However on my desktop machine after Ubuntu removed my ability to choose unity or not, I had to leave them behind. It will take a metric fuckton of improvements to get me to change back to ubuntu now. I went to LinuxMint and again had nothing but troubles. The common factor here is Gnome3, however even before Gnome3 windowing was not pleasant no matter how one goes about it.
These days my desktop runs Windows 7, and my servers continue to run Debian.
I only say all this because using the word "Linux" as you did implies NO distro is good for anything, which is far from the truth. "Linux GUI" however, and you are spot on.
I too tried to switch from Ubuntu to Mint on my core 2 duo p7350 (2ghz) with a GeForce gtx 275 card and 2 gig ram.
It takes a good 4-5 seconds for the unity screen to pop up once the mouse gets to the corner of the screen, and takes another 8-10 seconds to respond after clicking anything. The sub-menus take 2-3 seconds to show when mouse-over the main menu options.
The web browser is almost unusable with how long it takes to register a click after hitting the mouse button. We're talking click a link, wait, wait, say WTF!?, move the mouse just to make sure the system is still responding at all, and finally a few seconds later it 'clicks' where ever the pointer ended up out of frustration.
The last time I ran updates through the GUI, network traffic was still spiked for a number of minutes after the update was finished and the GUI app closed.
I can't find a single hardware fault that would cause this.
For as much as I despise Microsoft, I ended up putting Win 7 on it and it simply screams. I never in my life expected to hear myself say I prefer windows over anything else:/
Sadly the year of Linux on the desktop was 3-4 years ago, and it's been down hill since.
Slashdot Mirror
.upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart
Am I the only one that read that as: up up down down left right left right bastard ?
haven't we seen articles saying that bots are now more likely to be able to beat captchas than humans are? I know I usually have to reload many captcha images 2-3 times before I can find one that I can guess at with any likelyhood of success.
In fact such bots have been created, tested, proven, boxed, and sold.
Hell, for only $1.39 per 1000 solved captchas, we could spend as much as a cup of coffee and never have to try reading those annoying blurs again! :{
Sadly I don't suspect it actually would work like that for us non-spammers
Speaking of spammers, I have a feeling I'll be needing to update my filters to preemptively drop email from any TLD more than 3 characters. Sorry dot-info owners, but you can blame ICANN for this one.
I started in 1981 and there was no d3 then.
And you too can own your own d3, as well as d5, d7, d14, d30, d100
http://www.thinkgeek.com/geektoys/games/d031/?srp=12
I was also going to recommend DicePool but they appear out of business now :{
They had the "odd" dice set cheaper, as well as tens of thousands of normal polyhedral sets, and awesome deals on bulk dice (ie dice by the pound)
Is this a typical punishment for this kind of crime?
Yes, it's fairly typical for the government fine.
In cases like this there are two transfers of money. One to the government, and one to the victims of the crime.
Generally the fine that goes to the government is in the 2-3 digit range, occasionally 4. Rarely is there ever a fine at the $10,000 level or above that goes to the government or courts.
The next fine that will happen goes to the victims. This however will likely be huge, since he will have to pay for both medical bills, pain and suffering, and other compensation (loss of work and future work, loss of ability to be self sufficient, etc)
The medical bills alone could easily be in to the hundreds of thousands of dollars in the US, but all the rest added to that could easily bring it to a million dollars or more.
This part of the case hasn't happened yet so we don't know. Our legal system moves pretty slow too for civil cases unfortunately.
Personally I feel this is a good thing. If the government took all of this mans money, there would be nothing left over to go to the victims.
A lot of people are too poor to pay the victims anyway, which will result in jail time for them, which does not help result in them making a lot of money to send to the victims still.
But the most money needs to go to the victims where it belongs, not to the government. What money does go to the government for the court costs however should be from the criminal, not the victim, so it's not unreasonable to have both fines this way.
No, it will stil be smoke and mirrors. Magicians are pretty clever at making impossible things appear to happen, tricking a human into believing a machine is sentient is no different. Look up "Chinese room".
The problem of proving a machine is or is not sentient is actually very very old. At least 10,000 years old.
After all, can you prove to me you are sentient or conscious?
And I don't mean that as an insult. I can't prove that I am sentient or conscious to you either.
But if it is accepted that all humans are sentient, there is still the fact any one individual can not prove they are, let alone we as in humanity can't prove anyone else is.
Can we show even a lower species is sentient? I believe my pet dog is as sentient as I am, as well as is intelligent although not as much so as a human. I can not prove this at all however.
The same problem exists with software. A program created by a human will always have the Chinese Room issue at hand, and I agree would be extremely unlikely (and definitely not at all required) to be sentient simply to hold a conversation in a way to sound plausibly human.
The flip side to that would be YouTube comments. From that text alone, I'm sure YouTube only has about 100 actual users and a few million bots running around pretending :P
Not all humans could pass the turning test themselves!
But taken to the logical extreme, say we have a computer that is capable and powerful enough to run a simulation of our universe, with all laws of physics accounted for (a trick we still can't pull off, as we do not know all the laws of nature yet, despite how accurate and detailed our nuclear simulations have proven to be)
Simulating a meter cubed block of universe, containing an exact replica of your brain, would be equally as sentient as your current brain is within our matching non-simulated universe.
Would that simulation be sentient?
I would say, no more than you are right now. Some might say that is a 'yes', others might say that is a 'no'. But either way, that is currently our best bet for truly sentient and conscious software.
As for our current standing?
- We can currently simulate most aspects of reality, out of the subset of aspects we know of, down to subatomic levels in a large enough area to perform nuclear simulations that match perfectly to the real thing.
- We do not know enough about the interaction of atoms within the human (or any) brain to recreate one within a simulation (or the real universe either for that matter) however we know it is possible because it happens many times a day as new babies are born.
- The brain alone would not be enough. Enough sensory 'emulation' from a simulated environment would also be required. A child born and locked into a dark and silent 3x3x3 box with a feeding tube for years will not come out "human" by most non-genetic definitions.
- The above also requires simulating environment, enough so to at least emulate a functional body and world to explore both in.
- Even if some day possible, this is not Creating AI, this is Copying AI (Or would that be copying just I?)
Personally I think, despite our progression with computing technology and knowledge levels of both the universe as well as organic brains, we are so far from the level that would be required to even test concepts out, let alone the entire system, that any current test today is a joke.
It will be even longer after that before computers can do it all fast enough to approach simulating in real time. Nuclear simulations spend many many months and a great many resources simulating what in reality would be at best a couple seconds.
If nothing stops our progression, this all should be very possible some day. The laws of nature do not exclude it as possible, and in fact what we know so far shows it to be possible. Aka what we call "in theory."
Unfortunately for AI researchers, "some day" is likely not going to be any time they or their family line will still exist in.
Our closest apps to AI are Siri and whatever the Android voice app is. All they do is retrieve information. Same as a google search.
I would say the closest "app" to what you describe, that would still fall under the category of specialized AI, would be Watson.
It too is a huge information retrieval system, but specifically designed to play Jeopardy and play it well. It already bested the top two human players.
Of course it is still only a specialized AI engine, no where NEAR expert AI, and it most certainly does not think. Hell, it can't even read visually, see, hear, or a lot of other things required to truly play a game of Jeopardy. But it is leaps and bounds more complex and advanced than Siri currently is!
To me, Siri is nothing more than a good voice recognition app combined with Wolfram Alpha.
I don't mean to be belittling Siri in general, but in this comparison it is hard not to.
This is probably why the implementation date is slipping. The ISPs might be waking up to the shitstorm that comes when they roll this out.
I wonder how much government bailout money we will need to pay in extra taxes once the ISPs lose the large majority of their customers and income...
If supposedly 50% of people pirate just software, that alone will result in the ISPs only having 50% of their current income.
Throw music and movies into the mix, and it would not surprise me if that number was over 75%.
That's a hell of a lot of income to willingly refuse to take...
No *woosh* at all, I just wanted you to admit that first.
So now that you believe in all religions as possible, you are going to hell (or the equivalent) according to all of them.
Religion A states if you believe in any other god but theirs, you will go to hell. You state you do, so hell bound you are.
Religion B states if you believe in any other god but theirs, you will go to purgatory. You state you do, so purgatory bound you are.
Religion C states if you believe in any other god, you will be stoned to death. You state you do, so you better keep quiet about that or other followers will try to murder you.
You also equally believe in unicorns and fairies, since that too is impossible to know or prove.
Anyone who believes in unicorns and fairies is clearly delusional.
Definately not a *woosh* on anyone but possibly you, except I think you do know how ridiculous you sound with such claims, so I'm guessing it isn't over your head one bit.
The only rational option when it comes to Gods is: If God wants me to do or not do something, it's up to God to let me know, stop me, or force me.
Lacking that, the only assumption that can be made is I am not involved with Gods plans, and so those plans should not concern me. If they don't concern me, there is no need to adjust my own plans for life around them.
And before you say it, no I do not consider a book re-written hundreds of times by MAN to be the word of any God. A god, to fit the definition, would not need a book to let their wishes known. They would have an infinite number of means to assure we know without a doubt, if that was their goal.
Either god exists and doesn't care what we do, or god does not exist and it again doesn't matter what we do.
We have a name for people who hear and see things that no one else hears or sees because they are proven to not be there. Delusional.
I also see no reason to take into account any opinion or thoughts you might have, seeing as you admit you already broke the highest commandments of all the religions you feel are equally true.
If you can't keep yourself behaving properly to go to a heaven, then why would I want to follow you?
Once you understand why you reject all other gods as possible, you will understand why I reject yours.
It won't help solve our current environmental, economic of political problems, will it?
Neither does posting to Slashdot, or most all of the things you do on a daily basis. We still do them anyway.
Knowledge for the sake of knowing is great, but what will this information help us achieve?
It will achieve knowledge for the sake of knowing (Which yes is great.)
That's it. That is enough reason alone.
There is no reason to poopoo on another persons research topic, simply because it does not aid in the fairly short list of reasons you state as worthwhile. Especially so when you are just as guilty as the rest of us in "wasting" our time on not those things.
Inexpensive... whoops.
So one third of the price of your nearest competitor is not inexpensive in your mind?
I haven't seen it posted yet, so wanted to throw in my bit. TokyoFlash has some of the most beautiful watches I've ever seen.
http://www.tokyoflash.com/en/watches/1/
All sorts of styles, displays, and interpretations. Some are more pricey than others, but I'd say every last one is a piece of art more than a plain watch.
They are all limited edition, so if you wait a few months they will have in new models, but at the same time some current models will be discontinued. So if you find something you really like, don't put it off.
I'm not sure I understand the problem...
Did this malware hit the DSL modem web-config page from the Internet to change it's DNS settings?
Or is this Windows malware that, once infecting a PC on the LAN, used that PC to hit the web-config page?
One would assume the web-server in the DSL modem doesn't answer on the public interface or IP, but clearly they fucked up the security to start with so that's not an assumption I want to make.
If this malware hit it from the Internet, then it would be trivial for the ISP to do the same exact thing to put the settings back.
The ISP even has legit and legal access to their customer premise equipment, so it wouldn't be illegal or labeled as "hacking" in that case.
Even if the modem web-config only answers to the LAN IP, and it was an infected Windows box that automatically reconfigured the router... wouldn't there be a password of some sort?
And why doesn't the ISPs maintain a "maintenance" subnet where they CAN access the DSL modem?
All the ISP needs to do is add a route to their core routers for the old DNS server IPs that will be going down soon, and redirect those packets to their internal DNS servers.
Failing That, the ISP can log any customers that access the hijacked DNS IPs, build up a list, and mail out a letter to them postal style. If they don't read their ISPs snail-mail, then they deserve whatever outage they get.
Believe me, once service goes down, they WILL be calling the ISP. I can understand wanting to lessen the massive amounts of calls they are expecting on the 9th, but in order to lessen that flood they will need to do Something. Anything. Anything except the nothing they seem to be doing.
Just setup a web site with all the info they need, which can be accessed with an IP alone. Give that to them on the phone. Include both the address and IP in the snail mail letter.
Hell, at that point the ISP can include a link that when clicked will connect to the internal IP of the router and submit new DNS settings in the GET request. A small amount of javascript will handle if a POST is needed.
There is clearly no password on the web interface to deal with, or they wouldn't have this problem from the malware in the first place, so this should be trivial to fix semi-automated, and likely totally automated with a bit more work.
This sounds more like laziness and ineptness rather than any technical reason for fixing the problem.
Infrared? Not exactly wi-fi. You'd have to be in the same room as the router for this to work. I don't see many practical applications.
No terahertz is not exactly wifi. Both are blocked by thick metal for example, neither are blocked by wood glass or plastic.
In fact the only things I know of that will block terahertz which wifi goes through are water and bone. :P
If your walls are made of water or bone, then yes you will need to stay with gigahertz frequencies
What does it matter how easy the code was to write? And if it was so easy why did google need to copy it?
It matters a lot. Google didn't copy anything, Google WROTE IT.
Yes, an employee at Google is the one that wrote that exact bit of code, and sent it to Sun to put in Java. He then had to write the same function for Android, and since it is the same person with the same brain, he wrote the same code.
Or put another way, you used the words "easy to write" just now, and you have used those words before in your life. You are stating you plagiarized those words, from yourself. Which is a very stupid claim for you to make.
Exactly. Standard procedure is to close down the roads and block off the intersections, so it doesn't matter if the lights are green or not since the convoy will be the only ones on that road.
After the mess that makes out of traffic changing the traffic lights for the few minutes needed is only a minor disrupt to traffic, no more than if an ambulance or police vehicle had their lights/siren running and needed to run light.
This seems like the least annoying method compared to ones used in the past.
We will see drunks piss on a cable, then their next of kin sue the station and everyone else upstream.
These problems have already been solved.
The Japanese fast charging standard CHAdeMO has both power delivery as well as a CAN bus data connection in the "nozzle".
A communications channel is opened, and a diagnostic run on the battery system to determine there are no problems before power is even engaged to the pump.
Shorting out the CAN data lines will do nothing. Unless your piss can speak binary using the right protocol and sending the right responses up the line, there will be no power to harm you.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d3/CHAdeMO_Plug_VacavilleDavisStDC2.jpg
There is no reason to NOT include such a basic safety feature, which is always the case for any such potentially dangerous machinery designed to be fully self serviced by the below average consumer.
Gas stations are already under heavy video surveillance to prevent both vandalism and theft of service. This will not change.
And as for people who run unlocked wireless routers and let anybody in the neighborhood utilize their bandwidth, I have zero sympathy.
I'm glad to hear you say that! When I let myself into your home while you are at work, you just accepted all the blame for anything and everything I do!
After all, people who can't properly secure their front door or windows such as yourself, we have zero sympathy for."
Perhaps you should fix that problem and install a 6" 40 bolt security door, and cement all your fragile shaterable glass windows up. Such lax security on your part would require you to turn yourself in to the police after I let myself in, take all your unsecured stuff, and use your unsecured telephone to call in a hostage situation.
Most people would simply blame ME for the crime I committed, but not hard asses like us, right?
The menu bar rendering on Windows has been broken/fugly since FF4
How so? Looks fine to me when I need to access it with ALT...?
This is what it looks like to us: http://postimage.org/image/hysbkzbzf/
An ugly bubble surrounding the menu, with text highlights that do not blend with the window manager.
Further, the lack of NAT is something that has held back IPv6.
Whaa? Why?
Instead of using a private IP block behind a NAT box, just use a real IP block and a stateful firewall box.
Identical effect as NAT would have, with the bonus that you are guaranteed no other machine on the internet will be on a private network with the same IPs you use so VPN tunnels won't break.
You also gain the bonus feature that with a single config line change, you can put one of your private "NATed" machines out in your DMZ and don't have to reconfigure anything else but one entry on the firewall. No renumbering, no rerouting, no vlan adjustments, no NAT/PAT forwarding exceptions.
Why on earth you would want to cripple your network so badly when a stateful firewall will give an identical effect?
If you find and watch the BBC documentary "Richard Hammonds Journey To The Centre of the Planet", he visits a scientist performing experiments with turtles and magnetic fields.
(Specifically, towards the end of part 1 of the 2 parts)
They had a turtle velcroed in a vest so they could anchor it to a swing arm and let it move freely in a tank of water with full control of its flippers. The tank had boards along the outside with coiled wires which could induce a magnetic field.
By flipping the polarity and changing the magnetic field, the turtle would turn around and swim towards the other side of the tank.
The earths magnetic field is in fact many times larger than the earth itself, and while our compasses only show direction along the field lines, its possible to get your bearing north/south by the strength of the field. The field is quite uneven as well, so while it might not be possible to perform GPS levels of navigation, the strength of the field can indicate which area you are in along all directions.
Turtles use this to return to their birth place as you say, and this has been proven both by observation and by experiments.
Well worth the watch if you can locate the documentary.
The MPAA Lawyers have never played this nice..
Indeed, I am quite confused too.
They didn't mind the bad press over suing a 12 year old child OR a 80 year old grandfather for only 'several' movies, so we know it's not the age part that did it.
(source)
They also don't mind sending threatening letters to the military asking them to crack down on their own troops for them, so it isn't the American troops away from home part that did it either.
(source)
They didn't mind suing people for downloading movies for personal use and no profits involved, so we know that isn't what did it either.
(source)
This is a complete reversal of past policy on all counts!
My personal guess is that the lawsuit is already in the works, and they requested the court seal the details so the press doesn't get word of it. Then they release this announcement to try and look like they are being good guys. There can't be any other possibility. The Grinchs heart growing 3 sizes only happens in the movies.
That was a rhetorical question.
That's OK, I'm pretty sure that was a rhetorical answer too ;}
And I must say, one of the most nicely and politely worded rhetorical answers I have seen in some time now!
Be honest people, even if you're a fan, put down the kool-aid and admit that Linux fights with you FROM DAY ONE.
To be more fair, it isn't Linux specifically, but the GUI in desktop distros.
I have numerous Debian servers running (Not a single one with a desktop however) and never have problems.
It's only when you throw Gnome or KDE into the mix that I want to commit a multiple homicide slash suicide.
dissy@s3:~$ w
18:26:16 up 766 days, 23:06, 1 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Before anyone says it, that (and all my other) system is FULLY up to date, both userland and kernel patches, as of Wednesday evening.
(Ksplice is the most epic win since virtualization)
That reboot 2 years ago followed an almost 3 year uptime, and only happened due to power rearrangement issues and replacing its UPSs.
The reboot before that was after installation from optical media. Those two reboots are all that system has ever had in the past almost 5 years of running rock solid stable.
However on my desktop machine after Ubuntu removed my ability to choose unity or not, I had to leave them behind. It will take a metric fuckton of improvements to get me to change back to ubuntu now.
I went to LinuxMint and again had nothing but troubles. The common factor here is Gnome3, however even before Gnome3 windowing was not pleasant no matter how one goes about it.
These days my desktop runs Windows 7, and my servers continue to run Debian.
I only say all this because using the word "Linux" as you did implies NO distro is good for anything, which is far from the truth. "Linux GUI" however, and you are spot on.
I'm glad it's not just me!
I too tried to switch from Ubuntu to Mint on my core 2 duo p7350 (2ghz) with a GeForce gtx 275 card and 2 gig ram.
It takes a good 4-5 seconds for the unity screen to pop up once the mouse gets to the corner of the screen, and takes another 8-10 seconds to respond after clicking anything. The sub-menus take 2-3 seconds to show when mouse-over the main menu options.
The web browser is almost unusable with how long it takes to register a click after hitting the mouse button. We're talking click a link, wait, wait, say WTF!?, move the mouse just to make sure the system is still responding at all, and finally a few seconds later it 'clicks' where ever the pointer ended up out of frustration.
The last time I ran updates through the GUI, network traffic was still spiked for a number of minutes after the update was finished and the GUI app closed.
I can't find a single hardware fault that would cause this.
For as much as I despise Microsoft, I ended up putting Win 7 on it and it simply screams. I never in my life expected to hear myself say I prefer windows over anything else :/
Sadly the year of Linux on the desktop was 3-4 years ago, and it's been down hill since.