Oddly enough I've just done a training course at work called "Working with India" and one of the points was that Indian working culture had a preferrence for specific and detailed instructions (rather than general directives that the person then works out how to reach) as well as frequent interaction on a personal level. Programming tends to favour people of the latter type, ie. work out for yourself how to reach the goal, so it would seem to be one of those activities that goes against what Indian workers prefer and are used to.
Sounds like that (and the reduced contact due to the outsourced nature of the work) plays a part on why outsourced programming doesn't seem to work out as well as it should on paper.
My own experience would agree with being able to work leading to far more hours being spent working.. but that's not necessarily a good thing for your if you're a salaried worker. In my case I was finding myself working extra long hours on regular tasks because it felt like I had extra time to do so and going through emails as soon as I got up (at 4am), which eventually burned me out somewhat. I would do it again, but ideally it'd be something that had a set stopping point each working day.
There are definite benefits to remote work but at the same time there can be significant drawbacks depending on what your work style is, you have to know or learn very quickly to get off work.
From what news sources in Korea (much closer to Japan than China) have been saying throughout, increased radiation is being detected but it's not to the level where you'd have health concerns or need to destroy anything. Similarly I don't recall reading of radiation levels in japan itself (eg. Tokyo) that might point to the need to destroy luggage or hospitalise people.. maybe the people from near the reactor might cause concern but I think their concern would be for their homes and family rather than with travelling to china.
I have to say that this sounds like propaganda from the CCP.
I was a little leery of the actors story too even though I don't consider Samsung (or any other large corporation for that matter) as being the paragons of ethics, but in this case I'm guessing that it was just a case of an id10t shooting off at the mouth rather than someone paid to spread propaganda.
If he was paid to write that I hope for his sake it was enough to retire on because now his credibility in the field is effectively negative (ie. people will avoid him). For me the worst thing he's done is that he might have damaged the credibility of real security researchers through this stunt.
Not to blow my own horn, but there were some of us who were sceptical of the story until it was proven by independent sources (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061772&cid=35673170).
Basically the qualifications of the author aren't technical and he's commenting on a technical topic and the story was lacking on details so such a big claim couldn't (and shouldn't) be taken at face value without independent validation.
In this case the independent validation seems to very strongly refute the claim, which is unfortunate for the author's reputation.. I hope he's learned a lesson from this, nobody needs security people talking about things they don't understand.
No it doesn't mean that they're worthless.. they're just not technical certifications so in this case we should've been sceptical (like I said in the original story, http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061772&cid=35673170) because the certifications aren't relevant to the abilities required to make an informed comment.
Agree with your scepticism.. While the author seems to have good security qualifications, they're mostly non-technical or managerial level and the articles are awfully devoid of details and I'm concerned that he starts with attempts to equate his accusations with the Sony incident before even providing his evidence.. it sounds like he's experiencing confirmation bias.
If this is part of the standard install it should be easy to duplicate and with the publicity this is sure to generate it's likely to be attempted.. personally I'll wait for a technical person to comment on this and more importantly provide the details rather than "After an in-depth analysis of the laptop, my conclusion was that this software was installed by the manufacturer, Samsung" (that's not good enough imho).
I was responding to the parent's comment that xenophobia is ok as long as it doesn't affect us.. suffice to say that if that were acceptable then the holocause would be acceptable. Were you or your own directly affected by the holocaust? Most people would see that as unacceptable.
In regards to your comment about maintaining ethnic and cultural identity, if that were the extent of the deal then the label xenophobia wouldn't be appropriate, but that's not the root cause of seeking to replace temporary migrant workers with robots. By and large the temporary workers aren't going to be settling in japan on a permanent basis (both due to their own desires and the restrictive laws against it) so the argument that they're seeking to protect ethnic and cultural identity doesn't ring true.
One particularly interesting example of the attitude of japanese society is the treatment of japanese-brazilians.. they're effectively treated like 'gaijin', ie. a threat to japanese culture, even though for all intents and purposes they'd be seen as japanese in a society that wasn't xenophobic.
The trouble is that selfish individuals will then take advantage of that.. Jonas Salk refuses to patent the polio vaccine? I'll patent it and sue him for a 'clear' breach of my invention.
Sure, the 'prior invention' conditions should prevent this, but you can just DOS the patent offices by issuing requests for the most trivial things to prevent them from examining things in too much detail.
The system doesn't punish patent grabbing, it encourages it in fact, so you have to get patents for defensive purposes.. truly a sad state of affairs.
Back in the materials engineering classes glass was defined as being "a supercooled liquid of infinite viscosity".. but looking now it seems that it'd be more accurate to refer to it as an 'amorphous solid'
Glass, however, is actually neither a liquid—supercooled or otherwise—nor a solid. It is an amorphous solid—a state somewhere between those two states of matter. And yet glass's liquidlike properties are not enough to explain the thicker-bottomed windows, because glass atoms move too slowly for changes to be visible.
Solids are highly organized structures. They include crystals, like sugar and salt, with their millions of atoms lined up in a row, explains Mark Ediger, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "Liquids and glasses don't have that order," he notes. Glasses, though more organized than liquids, do not attain the rigid order of crystals. "Amorphous means it doesn't have that long-range order," Ediger says. With a "solid—if you grab it, it holds its shape," he adds.
When glass is made, the material (often containing silica) is quickly cooled from its liquid state but does not solidify when its temperature drops below its melting point. At this stage, the material is a supercooled liquid, an intermediate state between liquid and glass. To become an amorphous solid, the material is cooled further, below the glass-transition temperature. Past this point, the molecular movement of the material's atoms has slowed to nearly a stop and the material is now a glass. This new structure is not as organized as a crystal, because it did not freeze, but it is more organized than a liquid. For practical purposes, such as holding a drink, glass is like a solid, Ediger says, although a disorganized one.
Like liquids, these disorganized solids can flow, albeit very slowly. Over long periods of time, the molecules making up the glass shift themselves to settle into a more stable, crystallike formation, explains Ediger. The closer the glass is to its glass-transition temperature, the more it shifts; the further away from that changeover point, the slower its molecules move and the more solid it seems.
I see where you're coming from, but I suspect this is an error in translation.. IMHO there's a missing 'if found guilty by investigation' after penalize and he's speaking on behalf of the justice process.
Given that they've not even spoken to the developer and don't have the facts in hand (eg. the program in question) it's fair to say what the final conclusion should be is still uncertain.
It's still under investigation, ultimately the case rests on information such as whether this data collection was his work (intended or otherwise) or he was ordered to include this 'feature'. Followed by determining why it's there, eg. was it his own work or was it because of an order from above, etc. Juristiction is being mentioned because SK police obviously don't have the right to interview a US citizen without the cooperation of the US government, but beyond that the story so far is pretty stock standard for an ongoing police investigation.
The real-name laws in korea were created for two reasons:
1. Serious instances of unfounded slandering against various people, especially celebrities.but not restricted to them. The aim is to encourage people to behave responsibly on the internet by tieing what they post or upload back to the individual, beyond that the SK government doesn't give a rat's arse what you do online or which sites you go to.
Case in point being, to continue with your example, that Google (or more specifically Youtube) was required either to have a system to point back to the real-person or alternatively restrict the ability to post or upload potentially slanderous material. Google chose the latter and it's worthy of note that people can do everything else, eg. view videos.
Basically it's the side effect of having the highest rate of internet participation in the world.. you get all sorts of people just like normal society, including those who enjoy malicious rumour mongering and think they can engage in that behind the privacy of the internet. Ironically in a large proportion of cases it turns out the posters were immature school kids (including primary schoolers) being just that.. immature.
2. Many government functions that in real-life require authentication are fully online. This is probably beyond the experience of most people on slashdot, but you can do all sorts of personal activities online (eg. taxation, etc) and by definition you can't take people at their word when talking about those. Therefore real-name identification is required there also, particularly as there's rampant attempts at ID theft from china for various reasons.
Ironically your post is a perfect example of scenario 1, ie. malicious slandering by people hiding behind internet anonymity, in the manner in which you deliberately twist the SK's request and google's actions with unsubstantiated additions like:
- It's no secret that the South Korean government isn't overly fond of Google
Hardly, the government has only required that google comply with the laws that were created to address the previously listed comments. Beyond that Google has been free to operate as it sees fit.. calling that repressive is ridiculous, the government doesn't track people's activities nor are companies required to do anything beyond enabling the tracking down of people for legal purposes, eg. lawsuits for slander.
We're not talking about china and it's so-called golden shield (or shower to be more accurate).
- Google chose to block posts to YouTube from Korea
No, google chose to remove the functionality to post without an account liked to a real person. To quote from the article:
YouTube has decided to restrict its video upload and comment functions in South Korea.” It also stated, “Because there is no upload function, users won’t be required to confirm their identification.”
Note that viewing videos is not restricted at all and uploads/comments to sites that are linked to a real-person are unrestricted beyond the uploader being aware that they should be sociable in their behaviour.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google simply didn't feel it cost effective to create complex functionality that would be country specific (with all the possibilities that different countries would then start asking for their own items) so it was easier to simply remove rather than add.
- while encouraging those users to change their country preference to somewhere else
Where exactly did they say that?
It's fair to say that your post is a perfect example of what the law is designed to address, slanderers hiding behind anonymity to post all sorts of lies and half-truths. We'd all like to think that this type of people don't exist, but unfortunately some people only feel better by putting others down, one only has to look a
North Korea is beyond liberation. For change, the entire nation and it's culture must be obliterated. But that would be a genuine crime against humanity. So, we wait for South Korea to go up in smoke. That's when the endless talking with the Chinese and Russians start. Next, we decide on how best to rebuild that nation on the terms of the North Korean regime based on special provisions and treaties.
No, the Western World doesn't have the balls to face evil anymore. We are...pussies.
Someone once thought that way.. His name was Adolf Hitler and he thought that ridding the world of Jews was a good thing. Luckily the US fought against him 70 years back.
If you want to talk about evil, then perhaps you should look in the mirror first.
.. On top of that, right before the war they gave the North Koreans 70,000+ ethnic Korean soldiers from the Chinese People's Liberation Army, including two already-organized, experienced ethnic Korean divisions that had fought in the Chinese civil war. Kim Il Sung invaded the south only after Mao promised to send forces if the USA intervened..
Agree that there was a large influx of korean troops returning to NK after the end of the chinese civil war, but these weren't members of the chinese PLA (which didn't exist at the time). Those troops formed the KVA (Korean Volunteer Army) that fought side by side with the CCP forces.. the chinese forces in the korean war called themselves the People's Volunteer Army in tribute to the KVA since they were reciprocating the help they got from the KVA.
Neither Stalin or Mao or Kim Il Sung actually anticipated the US to intervene going by the statements that the US had made and the lack of assistance to SK (military or economical). And while Mao did intervene quite strongly, he wasn't consulted in the lead up to the start of the war.. rather he was kept in the dark because Stalin didn't trust Mao. Later on Stalin egged Mao on to intervene, but that was after the war turned bad for NK.
That must have been there a long time ago.. I can't say I ran into anything but clean air (as clean as you can expect in any city at least;) ) when I was there last northern summer. Nowadays half the problem is that the winds tend to blow the polution in Beijing as well as sand from Inner Mongolia over korea.
The chinese unfortunately refuse to do anything about the polution, which affects places as far away as Los Angeles:
China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research.
so the only thing that can be done is for korean volunteers and goverment agencies have to take the initiative in reforestation efforts in Inner Mongolia to at least abate the sand
Seoul launches reforestation of China’s Inner Mongolia region
by Joseph Yun Li-sun
The city of Seoul signs a US$ 49 million tree-planting agreement to reforest the Kubuqi, the seventh biggest desert in the world. The goal is to block sand blown by spring storms towards the Korean Peninsula.
Seoul (AsiaNews) – The Seoul Metropolitan Government has decided to plant 72,000 trees in the Kubuqi Desert of Inner Mongolia, which is the source of severe sandstorms that sweep across Asia. The aim is to prevent the so-called "yellow dust", dense clouds of fine, dry soil particles kicked up by high-speed surface winds in intense storms that block ventilation and irrigation systems on the Korean Peninsula and create health problems for the population.
The city signed the deal on Tuesday with Future Forest and the All China Youth Federation to plant 72,000 trees and will invest about W50 million (US$ 49 million) in the tree-planting project.
The plan calls for members of the All China Youth Federation, which is affiliated with the Communist Party of China, to plant trees in Inner Mongolia.
NGOs will provide technical leadership and logistical support to planters, who might have problems in creating small oases to guarantee the survival of the saplings.
The 72,000 trees include poplar and desert willow, the only trees capable of growing with shallow roots.
According to some studies by Seoul University, if the tree-planting project is completed as scheduled, a green ecosystem in the desert will come into being by the end of next year, and will be capable of stopping the sand when winds blow from the West.
The Kubuqi is located some 600 kilometres west of Beijing and is seventh largest desert in the world.
Covered in forests until the late 19th century, it lost its vegetation as a result of early industrial development and overpopulation.
The region is known to be the source of 40 per cent of the yellow dust, which affects the Korean Peninsula every spring.
The South Koreans decided to launch this initiative because dusty thunderstorms have worsened over the past decade.
Sand can provoke serious respiratory problems and affects especially vulnerable groups like children, women and the elderly.
It can also clog air conditioning, an essential service for South Koreans during hot humid summers.
From wiki it seems that it's widely used for genetic experiments:
E. coli is frequently used as a model organism in microbiology studies. Cultivated strains (e.g. E. coli K12) are well-adapted to the laboratory environment, and, unlike wild type strains, have lost their ability to thrive in the intestine. Many lab strains lose their ability to form biofilms.[70][71] These features protect wild type strains from antibodies and other chemical attacks, but require a large expenditure of energy and material resources.
In 1946, Joshua Lederberg and Edward Tatum first described the phenomenon known as bacterial conjugation using E. coli as a model bacterium,[72] and it remains the primary model to study conjugation.[citation needed] E. coli was an integral part of the first experiments to understand phage genetics,[73] and early researchers, such as Seymour Benzer, used E. coli and phage T4 to understand the topography of gene structure.[74] Prior to Benzer's research, it was not known whether the gene was a linear structure, or if it had a branching pattern.
E. coli was one of the first organisms to have its genome sequenced; the complete genome of E. coli K12 was published by Science in 1997.[75]
The long-term evolution experiments using E. coli, begun by Richard Lenski in 1988, have allowed direct observation of major evolutionary shifts in the laboratory.[76] In this experiment, one population of E. coli unexpectedly evolved the ability to aerobically metabolize citrate. This capacity is extremely rare in E. coli. As the inability to grow aerobically is normally used as a diagnostic criterion with which to differentiate E. coli from other, closely related bacteria such as Salmonella, this innovation may mark a speciation event observed in the lab.
By combining nanotechnologies with landscape ecology complex habitat landscapes can be generated with details at the nanoscale.[77] On such synthetic ecosystems evolutionary experiments with E. coli have been performed in order to study the spatial biophysics of adaptation in an island biogeography on-chip.
All the hype about APTs being some sort of new and fashionable attack method is puzzling. Ultimately the core is simply another form of malware, perhaps used for a slightly different purpose than the old-school script kiddie website defacing, but ultimately the same principles of security apply just as much to APT as they do to any other form of attack.
Or in other words:
The fact is this - malware has always had the ability to be updated in the field, it has always been able to be remote controlled, and it has always had the ability to spawn a remote shell to a live attacker. And, it has always had the ability to scan the file-system for files like source-code and CAD drawings, and it has always had the ability to exfiltrate those files. At all times and without exception, these malware programs have been operated by real and persistent humans at the other end. The malware doesn't operate itself, it's not an automaton. For the last 365 days, I just called that malware.
There'll always be people who prefer walking into a building to do their banking, but for the rest it's entirely possible to have a non-physical bank.
To take the example of ING, they used to rely purely on online and phone banking (ie. no physical branches period) but have now added the post office network for physical needs and rely on other bank's ATMs for physical money withdrawal. Of course an online bank would need to have excellent reliability on their online systems and excellent customer service on their phone centres, but if you have both then what's the big deal?
Frankly, if a bank is untrustworthy it doesn't matter whether they're physical or purely virtual.. to follow-on from your example, there's nothing to stop a bricks-and-mortar bank from closing your account and giving you the run around, being able to walk into a branch won't change that one iota.
Agree entirely.. the really stupid thing about it all is that the only reason they do so is to pad the balance sheet and meet the unrealistic expectation that profits must go up each year. Anything less is a failure.
Because the big four banks are already so large, it’s impossible for them collectively to grow at a faster rate than the overall economy. For one bank to enjoy higher growth means that they have to market share off the other three, and the big banks appear deeply reluctant to do this.
It’s clear from recent comments made by the banks that they’re dissatisfied with the rate at which their lending is growing. And this is backed by recent statistics from the Reserve Bank which show that while total bank lending for housing is relatively strong, (rising by 0.6 per cent in August to reach a level that’s 8.1 per cent higher than a year earlier), total business lending actually fell by 0.4 per cent in the month (and was down 4 per cent from a year earlier).
Faced with weak lending growth, the big banks will only be able to continue to report increases in their profits year after year if they are able to maintain – and, preferably build – their interest margins.
But this means that the banks are inevitably on a collision course with the rest of the community.
Exactly right, what people don't realise is that china has a revanchist desire against the west for the past 150 years. The americans were not the main protagonists against them, but they represent the system.
Suffice to say that the assumptions made by the US in engaging china don't agree with what the chinese themselves think:
...
China has long viewed American pre-eminence in the region as a historical accident and an aberration. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) feels enormously uncomfortable existing in a regional order that is based not just on open trade, freedom of the seas and rule-of-law, but also on a democratic community backed by American naval power and military alliances. Look through Chinese strategic documents over the past decade and around four-fifths are about how best to bind, dilute, circumvent or supersede American power and influence.
Rudd is correct to suggest that China has become a "major stakeholder" in the regional and global system. But the broad-brush approach by America and its partners in Asia has been to encourage China to be a "responsible stakeholder" as it rises – one that will increasingly uphold and strengthen the existing order rather than seek to challenge or subvert it. But the latter is precisely what Beijing is looking to do, even as it has been a significant beneficiary of the current system.
Washington erroneously assumes it can shape Chinese goals and purposes. While encouraging China to be a responsible stakeholder is seen as an end-game in the US, internal debates within China reveal that Beijing sees behaving as a responsible stakeholder as a way to bide its time while it builds what it terms Chinese "comprehensive national power."
The responsible stakeholder approach is designed to entrench China as a status quo power because it has been allowed to benefit from the current system. For example, China benefits enormously from the US naval role in the South China Sea, which helps trade and commerce to thrive by protecting trade routes. Yet while the US devotes ships, troops and money to these efforts, China benefits as a security free-loader in the region instead of a trusted contributor.
China has not become an entrenched stakeholder within the US-led region. Indeed, its disruptive claims to over four-fifths of the South China Sea have only intensified, rather than faded, as it continues to rise within the existing order. This approach assumes there is no alternative for emerging states but to compete within the existing open and liberal order.
The responsible stakeholder framework does not account for the fact that rising participants – especially genuinely powerful ones – can seek to gradually dismantle and redesign the current order from within. Subversion and "winning without fighting," rather than confrontation and contest, is the prudent Chinese strategy for undermining both the US and the strength of Washington’s security alliances and partnerships in Asia-Pacific.
The responsible stakeholder framework also assumes that Chinese interests and ambitions are elastic and can be molded according to the circumstances of China's rise. This argument ignores compelling historical and contemporary evidence that China is predisposed to seek leadership of Asia and to recast the regional order according to its preferences. After all, regaining its paramount place in the region is inextricable from reversing what Chinese history books describe as 150 years of humiliation at the hands of western and Japanese powers.
Slashdot Mirror
In my case it sent me to hxxp://bestlaserscanantiv.com/index.php?06abQDU9QU6XUGv8rSw2jMiscm1vOCQ5eFBceXKtAFhQMZFwRCiHftY70F8ghchXFnM=
User beware! The IBtimes article in the summary attempts to redirect to a fake antivirus page
Oddly enough I've just done a training course at work called "Working with India" and one of the points was that Indian working culture had a preferrence for specific and detailed instructions (rather than general directives that the person then works out how to reach) as well as frequent interaction on a personal level. Programming tends to favour people of the latter type, ie. work out for yourself how to reach the goal, so it would seem to be one of those activities that goes against what Indian workers prefer and are used to.
Sounds like that (and the reduced contact due to the outsourced nature of the work) plays a part on why outsourced programming doesn't seem to work out as well as it should on paper.
My own experience would agree with being able to work leading to far more hours being spent working .. but that's not necessarily a good thing for your if you're a salaried worker. In my case I was finding myself working extra long hours on regular tasks because it felt like I had extra time to do so and going through emails as soon as I got up (at 4am), which eventually burned me out somewhat. I would do it again, but ideally it'd be something that had a set stopping point each working day.
There are definite benefits to remote work but at the same time there can be significant drawbacks depending on what your work style is, you have to know or learn very quickly to get off work.
From what news sources in Korea (much closer to Japan than China) have been saying throughout, increased radiation is being detected but it's not to the level where you'd have health concerns or need to destroy anything. Similarly I don't recall reading of radiation levels in japan itself (eg. Tokyo) that might point to the need to destroy luggage or hospitalise people .. maybe the people from near the reactor might cause concern but I think their concern would be for their homes and family rather than with travelling to china.
I have to say that this sounds like propaganda from the CCP.
I was a little leery of the actors story too even though I don't consider Samsung (or any other large corporation for that matter) as being the paragons of ethics, but in this case I'm guessing that it was just a case of an id10t shooting off at the mouth rather than someone paid to spread propaganda.
If he was paid to write that I hope for his sake it was enough to retire on because now his credibility in the field is effectively negative (ie. people will avoid him). For me the worst thing he's done is that he might have damaged the credibility of real security researchers through this stunt.
Not to blow my own horn, but there were some of us who were sceptical of the story until it was proven by independent sources (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061772&cid=35673170).
.. I hope he's learned a lesson from this, nobody needs security people talking about things they don't understand.
Basically the qualifications of the author aren't technical and he's commenting on a technical topic and the story was lacking on details so such a big claim couldn't (and shouldn't) be taken at face value without independent validation.
In this case the independent validation seems to very strongly refute the claim, which is unfortunate for the author's reputation
No it doesn't mean that they're worthless .. they're just not technical certifications so in this case we should've been sceptical (like I said in the original story, http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2061772&cid=35673170) because the certifications aren't relevant to the abilities required to make an informed comment.
Agree with your scepticism .. While the author seems to have good security qualifications, they're mostly non-technical or managerial level and the articles are awfully devoid of details and I'm concerned that he starts with attempts to equate his accusations with the Sony incident before even providing his evidence .. it sounds like he's experiencing confirmation bias.
If this is part of the standard install it should be easy to duplicate and with the publicity this is sure to generate it's likely to be attempted.. personally I'll wait for a technical person to comment on this and more importantly provide the details rather than "After an in-depth analysis of the laptop, my conclusion was that this software was installed by the manufacturer, Samsung" (that's not good enough imho).
I was responding to the parent's comment that xenophobia is ok as long as it doesn't affect us .. suffice to say that if that were acceptable then the holocause would be acceptable. Were you or your own directly affected by the holocaust? Most people would see that as unacceptable.
.. they're effectively treated like 'gaijin', ie. a threat to japanese culture, even though for all intents and purposes they'd be seen as japanese in a society that wasn't xenophobic.
In regards to your comment about maintaining ethnic and cultural identity, if that were the extent of the deal then the label xenophobia wouldn't be appropriate, but that's not the root cause of seeking to replace temporary migrant workers with robots. By and large the temporary workers aren't going to be settling in japan on a permanent basis (both due to their own desires and the restrictive laws against it) so the argument that they're seeking to protect ethnic and cultural identity doesn't ring true.
One particularly interesting example of the attitude of japanese society is the treatment of japanese-brazilians
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing - attributed to Edmund Burke
Standing by and doing nothing about 'evil acts' is a choice in itself .. a choice of tacit support for those perpetrating such acts.
The trouble is that selfish individuals will then take advantage of that .. Jonas Salk refuses to patent the polio vaccine? I'll patent it and sue him for a 'clear' breach of my invention.
.. truly a sad state of affairs.
Sure, the 'prior invention' conditions should prevent this, but you can just DOS the patent offices by issuing requests for the most trivial things to prevent them from examining things in too much detail.
The system doesn't punish patent grabbing, it encourages it in fact, so you have to get patents for defensive purposes
That's right .. the chain gang, just like the rest of us
Glass, however, is actually neither a liquid—supercooled or otherwise—nor a solid. It is an amorphous solid—a state somewhere between those two states of matter. And yet glass's liquidlike properties are not enough to explain the thicker-bottomed windows, because glass atoms move too slowly for changes to be visible.
Solids are highly organized structures. They include crystals, like sugar and salt, with their millions of atoms lined up in a row, explains Mark Ediger, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "Liquids and glasses don't have that order," he notes. Glasses, though more organized than liquids, do not attain the rigid order of crystals. "Amorphous means it doesn't have that long-range order," Ediger says. With a "solid—if you grab it, it holds its shape," he adds.
When glass is made, the material (often containing silica) is quickly cooled from its liquid state but does not solidify when its temperature drops below its melting point. At this stage, the material is a supercooled liquid, an intermediate state between liquid and glass. To become an amorphous solid, the material is cooled further, below the glass-transition temperature. Past this point, the molecular movement of the material's atoms has slowed to nearly a stop and the material is now a glass. This new structure is not as organized as a crystal, because it did not freeze, but it is more organized than a liquid. For practical purposes, such as holding a drink, glass is like a solid, Ediger says, although a disorganized one.
Like liquids, these disorganized solids can flow, albeit very slowly. Over long periods of time, the molecules making up the glass shift themselves to settle into a more stable, crystallike formation, explains Ediger. The closer the glass is to its glass-transition temperature, the more it shifts; the further away from that changeover point, the slower its molecules move and the more solid it seems.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fact-fiction-glass-liquid
I see where you're coming from, but I suspect this is an error in translation .. IMHO there's a missing 'if found guilty by investigation' after penalize and he's speaking on behalf of the justice process.
Given that they've not even spoken to the developer and don't have the facts in hand (eg. the program in question) it's fair to say what the final conclusion should be is still uncertain.
It's still under investigation, ultimately the case rests on information such as whether this data collection was his work (intended or otherwise) or he was ordered to include this 'feature'. Followed by determining why it's there, eg. was it his own work or was it because of an order from above, etc. Juristiction is being mentioned because SK police obviously don't have the right to interview a US citizen without the cooperation of the US government, but beyond that the story so far is pretty stock standard for an ongoing police investigation.
1. Serious instances of unfounded slandering against various people, especially celebrities.but not restricted to them. The aim is to encourage people to behave responsibly on the internet by tieing what they post or upload back to the individual, beyond that the SK government doesn't give a rat's arse what you do online or which sites you go to.
Case in point being, to continue with your example, that Google (or more specifically Youtube) was required either to have a system to point back to the real-person or alternatively restrict the ability to post or upload potentially slanderous material. Google chose the latter and it's worthy of note that people can do everything else, eg. view videos.
Basically it's the side effect of having the highest rate of internet participation in the world
2. Many government functions that in real-life require authentication are fully online. This is probably beyond the experience of most people on slashdot, but you can do all sorts of personal activities online (eg. taxation, etc) and by definition you can't take people at their word when talking about those. Therefore real-name identification is required there also, particularly as there's rampant attempts at ID theft from china for various reasons.
Ironically your post is a perfect example of scenario 1, ie. malicious slandering by people hiding behind internet anonymity, in the manner in which you deliberately twist the SK's request and google's actions with unsubstantiated additions like:
- It's no secret that the South Korean government isn't overly fond of Google
Hardly, the government has only required that google comply with the laws that were created to address the previously listed comments. Beyond that Google has been free to operate as it sees fit
We're not talking about china and it's so-called golden shield (or shower to be more accurate).
- Google chose to block posts to YouTube from Korea
No, google chose to remove the functionality to post without an account liked to a real person. To quote from the article:
YouTube has decided to restrict its video upload and comment functions in South Korea.” It also stated, “Because there is no upload function, users won’t be required to confirm their identification.”
Note that viewing videos is not restricted at all and uploads/comments to sites that are linked to a real-person are unrestricted beyond the uploader being aware that they should be sociable in their behaviour.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google simply didn't feel it cost effective to create complex functionality that would be country specific (with all the possibilities that different countries would then start asking for their own items) so it was easier to simply remove rather than add.
- while encouraging those users to change their country preference to somewhere else
Where exactly did they say that?
It's fair to say that your post is a perfect example of what the law is designed to address, slanderers hiding behind anonymity to post all sorts of lies and half-truths. We'd all like to think that this type of people don't exist, but unfortunately some people only feel better by putting others down, one only has to look a
North Korea is beyond liberation. For change, the entire nation and it's culture must be obliterated . But that would be a genuine crime against humanity. So, we wait for South Korea to go up in smoke. That's when the endless talking with the Chinese and Russians start. Next, we decide on how best to rebuild that nation on the terms of the North Korean regime based on special provisions and treaties.
No, the Western World doesn't have the balls to face evil anymore. We are...pussies.
Someone once thought that way .. His name was Adolf Hitler and he thought that ridding the world of Jews was a good thing. Luckily the US fought against him 70 years back.
If you want to talk about evil, then perhaps you should look in the mirror first.
.. On top of that, right before the war they gave the North Koreans 70,000+ ethnic Korean soldiers from the Chinese People's Liberation Army, including two already-organized, experienced ethnic Korean divisions that had fought in the Chinese civil war. Kim Il Sung invaded the south only after Mao promised to send forces if the USA intervened ..
Agree that there was a large influx of korean troops returning to NK after the end of the chinese civil war, but these weren't members of the chinese PLA (which didn't exist at the time). Those troops formed the KVA (Korean Volunteer Army) that fought side by side with the CCP forces .. the chinese forces in the korean war called themselves the People's Volunteer Army in tribute to the KVA since they were reciprocating the help they got from the KVA.
.. rather he was kept in the dark because Stalin didn't trust Mao. Later on Stalin egged Mao on to intervene, but that was after the war turned bad for NK.
Neither Stalin or Mao or Kim Il Sung actually anticipated the US to intervene going by the statements that the US had made and the lack of assistance to SK (military or economical). And while Mao did intervene quite strongly, he wasn't consulted in the lead up to the start of the war
The chinese unfortunately refuse to do anything about the polution, which affects places as far away as Los Angeles:
China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/26/world/asia/26china.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
so the only thing that can be done is for korean volunteers and goverment agencies have to take the initiative in reforestation efforts in Inner Mongolia to at least abate the sand
Seoul launches reforestation of China’s Inner Mongolia region by Joseph Yun Li-sun The city of Seoul signs a US$ 49 million tree-planting agreement to reforest the Kubuqi, the seventh biggest desert in the world. The goal is to block sand blown by spring storms towards the Korean Peninsula.
Seoul (AsiaNews) – The Seoul Metropolitan Government has decided to plant 72,000 trees in the Kubuqi Desert of Inner Mongolia, which is the source of severe sandstorms that sweep across Asia. The aim is to prevent the so-called "yellow dust", dense clouds of fine, dry soil particles kicked up by high-speed surface winds in intense storms that block ventilation and irrigation systems on the Korean Peninsula and create health problems for the population. The city signed the deal on Tuesday with Future Forest and the All China Youth Federation to plant 72,000 trees and will invest about W50 million (US$ 49 million) in the tree-planting project.
The plan calls for members of the All China Youth Federation, which is affiliated with the Communist Party of China, to plant trees in Inner Mongolia.
NGOs will provide technical leadership and logistical support to planters, who might have problems in creating small oases to guarantee the survival of the saplings.
The 72,000 trees include poplar and desert willow, the only trees capable of growing with shallow roots.
According to some studies by Seoul University, if the tree-planting project is completed as scheduled, a green ecosystem in the desert will come into being by the end of next year, and will be capable of stopping the sand when winds blow from the West.
The Kubuqi is located some 600 kilometres west of Beijing and is seventh largest desert in the world.
Covered in forests until the late 19th century, it lost its vegetation as a result of early industrial development and overpopulation.
The region is known to be the source of 40 per cent of the yellow dust, which affects the Korean Peninsula every spring.
The South Koreans decided to launch this initiative because dusty thunderstorms have worsened over the past decade.
Sand can provoke serious respiratory problems and affects especially vulnerable groups like children, women and the elderly.
It can also clog air conditioning, an essential service for South Koreans during hot humid summers.
http://www.asianews.it/index.php?l=en&art=16776
E. coli is frequently used as a model organism in microbiology studies. Cultivated strains (e.g. E. coli K12) are well-adapted to the laboratory environment, and, unlike wild type strains, have lost their ability to thrive in the intestine. Many lab strains lose their ability to form biofilms.[70][71] These features protect wild type strains from antibodies and other chemical attacks, but require a large expenditure of energy and material resources.
In 1946, Joshua Lederberg and Edward Tatum first described the phenomenon known as bacterial conjugation using E. coli as a model bacterium,[72] and it remains the primary model to study conjugation.[citation needed] E. coli was an integral part of the first experiments to understand phage genetics,[73] and early researchers, such as Seymour Benzer, used E. coli and phage T4 to understand the topography of gene structure.[74] Prior to Benzer's research, it was not known whether the gene was a linear structure, or if it had a branching pattern.
E. coli was one of the first organisms to have its genome sequenced; the complete genome of E. coli K12 was published by Science in 1997.[75]
The long-term evolution experiments using E. coli, begun by Richard Lenski in 1988, have allowed direct observation of major evolutionary shifts in the laboratory.[76] In this experiment, one population of E. coli unexpectedly evolved the ability to aerobically metabolize citrate. This capacity is extremely rare in E. coli. As the inability to grow aerobically is normally used as a diagnostic criterion with which to differentiate E. coli from other, closely related bacteria such as Salmonella, this innovation may mark a speciation event observed in the lab.
By combining nanotechnologies with landscape ecology complex habitat landscapes can be generated with details at the nanoscale.[77] On such synthetic ecosystems evolutionary experiments with E. coli have been performed in order to study the spatial biophysics of adaptation in an island biogeography on-chip.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli
but out of all bacteria that could use used why use one associated with human disease?
Or in other words:
The fact is this - malware has always had the ability to be updated in the field, it has always been able to be remote controlled, and it has always had the ability to spawn a remote shell to a live attacker. And, it has always had the ability to scan the file-system for files like source-code and CAD drawings, and it has always had the ability to exfiltrate those files. At all times and without exception, these malware programs have been operated by real and persistent humans at the other end. The malware doesn't operate itself, it's not an automaton. For the last 365 days, I just called that malware.
http://fasthorizon.blogspot.com/2010/02/is-term-malware-eclipsed-by-apt.html
There'll always be people who prefer walking into a building to do their banking, but for the rest it's entirely possible to have a non-physical bank.
.. to follow-on from your example, there's nothing to stop a bricks-and-mortar bank from closing your account and giving you the run around, being able to walk into a branch won't change that one iota.
To take the example of ING, they used to rely purely on online and phone banking (ie. no physical branches period) but have now added the post office network for physical needs and rely on other bank's ATMs for physical money withdrawal. Of course an online bank would need to have excellent reliability on their online systems and excellent customer service on their phone centres, but if you have both then what's the big deal?
Frankly, if a bank is untrustworthy it doesn't matter whether they're physical or purely virtual
Because the big four banks are already so large, it’s impossible for them collectively to grow at a faster rate than the overall economy. For one bank to enjoy higher growth means that they have to market share off the other three, and the big banks appear deeply reluctant to do this.
It’s clear from recent comments made by the banks that they’re dissatisfied with the rate at which their lending is growing. And this is backed by recent statistics from the Reserve Bank which show that while total bank lending for housing is relatively strong, (rising by 0.6 per cent in August to reach a level that’s 8.1 per cent higher than a year earlier), total business lending actually fell by 0.4 per cent in the month (and was down 4 per cent from a year earlier).
Faced with weak lending growth, the big banks will only be able to continue to report increases in their profits year after year if they are able to maintain – and, preferably build – their interest margins.
But this means that the banks are inevitably on a collision course with the rest of the community.
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/CBAs-bold-move-may-backfire-pd20101103-ATSKH?OpenDocument
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China has long viewed American pre-eminence in the region as a historical accident and an aberration. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) feels enormously uncomfortable existing in a regional order that is based not just on open trade, freedom of the seas and rule-of-law, but also on a democratic community backed by American naval power and military alliances. Look through Chinese strategic documents over the past decade and around four-fifths are about how best to bind, dilute, circumvent or supersede American power and influence.
Rudd is correct to suggest that China has become a "major stakeholder" in the regional and global system. But the broad-brush approach by America and its partners in Asia has been to encourage China to be a "responsible stakeholder" as it rises – one that will increasingly uphold and strengthen the existing order rather than seek to challenge or subvert it. But the latter is precisely what Beijing is looking to do, even as it has been a significant beneficiary of the current system.
Washington erroneously assumes it can shape Chinese goals and purposes. While encouraging China to be a responsible stakeholder is seen as an end-game in the US, internal debates within China reveal that Beijing sees behaving as a responsible stakeholder as a way to bide its time while it builds what it terms Chinese "comprehensive national power."
The responsible stakeholder approach is designed to entrench China as a status quo power because it has been allowed to benefit from the current system. For example, China benefits enormously from the US naval role in the South China Sea, which helps trade and commerce to thrive by protecting trade routes. Yet while the US devotes ships, troops and money to these efforts, China benefits as a security free-loader in the region instead of a trusted contributor.
China has not become an entrenched stakeholder within the US-led region. Indeed, its disruptive claims to over four-fifths of the South China Sea have only intensified, rather than faded, as it continues to rise within the existing order. This approach assumes there is no alternative for emerging states but to compete within the existing open and liberal order.
The responsible stakeholder framework does not account for the fact that rising participants – especially genuinely powerful ones – can seek to gradually dismantle and redesign the current order from within. Subversion and "winning without fighting," rather than confrontation and contest, is the prudent Chinese strategy for undermining both the US and the strength of Washington’s security alliances and partnerships in Asia-Pacific.
The responsible stakeholder framework also assumes that Chinese interests and ambitions are elastic and can be molded according to the circumstances of China's rise. This argument ignores compelling historical and contemporary evidence that China is predisposed to seek leadership of Asia and to recast the regional order according to its preferences. After all, regaining its paramount place in the region is inextricable from reversing what Chinese history books describe as 150 years of humiliation at the hands of western and Japanese powers.
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/China-power-economic-west-foreign-relations-policy-pd20100506-579DV?opendocument&src=rss
Unfortunately there's many similarities between interwar Germany and China a