I look forward to reading your (posthumous) biography after you die from cell rot in Guantanamo bay, or one of the secret prisons the USA doesn't have in various European, Asian and Oriental countries.
I use Safari on Mac OS X. Every time I click an adword, it directs me to some intermediate page which then goes nowhere.
So I wonder how many "false non-clicks" they get from people like me? And then how many of my "copy the URL and paste it into the address bar" workarounds are they counting as "false clicks"?
Hydroelectric is the most expensive form of electricity generation, followed closedly by wind power, then nuclear, with gas and coal falling way, way down the list.
The main benefit of hydroelectric power is that it can be stopped and started so quickly. The coal and gas plants take the best part of an hour to ramp up or down, so you use the hydroelectric plan to carry the burden until the more efficient (and slow, cumbersome) plants come up to speed.
Of course, if you live in a country that has to import most of its coal from Australia, especially if you live in a mountainout region with a high annual rainfall, the story may be different.
The high cost of nuclear power is what is driving the Howard government to consider "carbon tax" on all coal and gas fired power plants, so that the nuclear plants that Little Johnny wants so desperately can be built by commercial interests without extensive government subsidies.
All of this is extremely off topic, of course. I expect the burough's true motivation for denying Apple's request to convert three parking meters to a "no parking" zone is the loss of parking fine income.
If you had a Windows machine, you'd realise that the patch Tuesday actually happened on Thursday.
I am not aware of any telecommunications system in the world that has not reached its five-nines reliability rating through trial and error. Earthquake shakes all the phones off the hook in a major city, leading to your telephone exchanges crashing because noone thought of the situation of 1 million people simultaneously trying to listen to the dial tone? You learn, and write around the error (in the simplest case, simply stop giving dialtone once you're already serving dialtone to the first hundred thousand phones, and tell the administrator that something is afoot).
What effectively happened to Skype is that they got Slashdotted. But this was Slashdotting done properly - there was no fascinating article on a geek blog that led hundreds of thousands of people to a particular site in the course of half an hour. This was a vendor-enforced reboot which leds millions of people to a particular Internet service. Microsoft is to Slashdot as Caterpillar D9 is to hand trowel.
It's not Microsoft's fault that Skype crashed, but Microsoft's peculiar habit of forcing millions of consumer PCs to peform exactly the same Internet-based operation at the same time certainly highlighted a flaw in Skype's networking model.
As for the outage lasting for three days... in the case of a Slashdotting, the people visiting the site after it's melted down will see the "service unavailable" message and think, "Cool! Slashdotted already!". The software responsible for melting down Skype's infrastructure was just continually trying to connect over and over again. The moment the servers were up, they were no doubt being hit by thousands of authentication requests per second, which would bring them right back down again.
When you are Slashdotted, you get a short-term, extreme rise in traffic. This traffic then peters out and returns to "normal" levels after a day or so (the article leading to the Slashdotting has been read by all subscribers). What happened in this case was that automatic connection attempts were being repeated over and over again by software that was configured to connect as soon as the computer was turned on. Thus the traffic would have risen to a certain maximum within the first few hours, and then stayed there until some authentication requests were approved. Once the first batch of nodes were authenticated and new nodes were able to retrieve the seed information, I expect the load would have dropped exponentially.
Since this was an operating system and some service software that was responsible for the endless connect requests, I don't expect there would have been any backoff in the load. The OS was rebooted, the software tried to reconnect, and kept trying in the belief that it would eventually get a connection.
So Skype actually got Microsofted.
Now they've fixed their software to cope with this event, should it ever happen again.
You can produce highly accurate maps, or details of architecture without having one specific person on the ground collecting all that information. I refer you to the Open Street Map project in the first instance, and Sea Dragon in the second. In the Sea Dragon demo, take special note of the discussion about Photosynth, where they construct a surface model of Notre Dame cathedral using hundreds of photos from Flickr.
So how does this apply to Second Life? Well... take the smarts behind Photosynth, the multi-author sythesis of maps from Open Street Map, the shared envrionment of Second Life where multiple people can contribute tiny pieces to one project, and you end up with a means to produce highly detailed maps of places you want to explore. Is it really that great a leap to presume that some groups might be organising this kind of activity? Is it possible to make models of buildings and cities in Second Life that have exactly the detail you need to plan your special operation? Is the detail you need something that you can put into a public space and not raise too much curiosity?
On the other side of the argument - why would terrorists go and set up their own virtual worlds (the hosting! think of the hosting!) when they can use someone else's virtual world, where the work they do adding features into the game is expected as part of the social contract of that game world?
In World of Warcraft, they can work on training the organisational structure. Everyone who has run a raiding guild knows that it's almost like running a business. You train in recruitment, skills, discipline, project planning, dispbursment of funds, resource planning, supervision and follow up reporting. Again, why would they go to a special "terrorist only" space when they can practice these skills where they are expected to have them? Why invest in all the traceable hardware using traceable funds, when they can just be part of a world where all the stuff they want to learn is already expected to happen?
No, I don't expect that terrorists will be trying to fly netherdrakes into buildings any time soon. If you can dismiss that part of the report talking about "World of Warcraft" and "realistic weapons", and accept that these virtual worlds provide excellent grounds for training specific skills, then the whole idea of "terrorists r in UR raid, setting U up the bomb" becomes a little more believable.
Then you have to start asking questions like... "how can we distinguish would-be terrorists from the normal populace in these virtual worlds?"
The catch, of course, being that you don't know what information you might want to hide from tomorrow's fascist dictatorship.
Today, it was cool to be cruising up and down the mall showing off your car to attract eligible young ladies. Tomorrow, after the oil runs out, all those people cruising up and down the mall become retrospectively guilty of various emissions breaches, and crimes against the environment. Or maybe it turns out that the mall was also a favourite gathering spot for the scapegoat religious community du jour (Jews, Irish Catholics, Scientologists). So someone gets busy extracting that information from the database, and suddenly just because you were cruising for chicks, you now become a suspected Irish Catholic sympathiser.
Of course, fast forward a few years and it might not be Irish Catholics who are the focus of our terrorist fears. Maybe you'll be a terror suspect because you were driving through a predominantly Buddhist neighbourhood. Or your car spent too long parked in the vicinity of a Labour Party member's house.
And God forbid you happen to come back to Australia after performing these unsavoury acts - you've seen what we do to people who give half used prepaid SIM cards to their friends in other countries! Imagine if you went to the UK, and while you stayed there you gave a Irish Catholic a lift because his bomb of a car blew up?
(in Australian slang, a "bomb" is a car that is barely worth repairing, and a car "blowing up" means that something has broken that requires more than a pair of stockings and fencing wire to repair)
No, this surveillance system does not seem sensible to me. What happens if we put the "what if you commit a crime later" shoe on the ohter foot? I reach the conclusion that the only reason you'd want to track everyone's movements now is to allow you to generate scapegoats later on! When they came for the Communists, I didn't speak up because I'm not a Communist, yadda yadda...
The first question when considering new legislation or "crime fighting tools" is not "how will this make life better when used correctly" but "what impact will this have on our community if abused?"
What's this stuff that everyone's talking about with "ads by Google" way off the right of the search result?
Any time I search Google, I only ever get "organic" results in the main portion of the page, with a "Sponsored links" column over to the left. I've visited all the links in the main portion and they seem legit.
Can someone suggest a search term that will produce anything that looks like a sponsored link (ie: "non-organic" in the ACCC's lingo)? Perhaps the stealth ads are only visible to IE users?
5) When I leave the company, I have to submit the entire computer to a third-party security consultant who will check the machine to ensure I am not leaving with any company intellectual property. I must reimburse the company for the costs involved in this.
ROFLMAO!
Do they ask you to submit the computer to a third party security consultant every day you leave the office? Or just that last time when you've already sanitised the machine by loading Mac OS X onto it fresh? And conveniently hidden your 2GB thumb drive with the Death Star plans in the crevice of some robot's carapace?
You will, of course, be taking steps to blatantly and flagrantly violate these stupid rules, won't you? If it was a company laptop they wouldn't have all these nasty Microsoft bogeymen terrifying them in their sleep...
I think Blizzard needs to wise up and cash in on the market that they've created.
There's a WoW Mastercard. Why can't they have a novel rewards program - spend $100 on your WoW Mastercard, get 100g in game! It's better than any other reward point system out there because there is no negotiation to be made with third party suppliers, no real money cost to the company, and a very big incentive to get people to use your Mastercard programme.
If the gold was so easily available from the game publisher, the RMT market would evaporate. Who would you trust more - this website in China asking for your credit card details, or Blizzard offering you in-game money when you make your regular groceries and comestibles purchase using your WoW Mastercard?
On the other hand, a player-to-player RMT system would allow me to turn my addiction into some extra drinks money...
So I wonder if a device like this will eventually become the standard to replace smart cards, fingerprint readers, etc. Store your crypto material on this device, and present a crypto API via the USB port. No longer will you need to shuffle sensitive crypto material around on your desktop box very carefully lest it be written to swap in cleartext.
Now all you need is that alpha source and a USB Gieger counter...
In laymans terms, the "Junk DNA" provides the bootstrap routine and program code of an life form building nano-machine. The "Gene DNA" provides the instructions to the life-form-building-machine on how to make this life form a "human" or "fly" or "bacteria".
And to the grandparent post - I would argue that the "junk DNA" is not the data segment. For decades we've been thinking of the "Gene DNA" as the program when it is in fact the input data, while the "Junk DNA" is the boot loader, operating system and interpreter. But the machine doesn't build stuff and then move on (like a human-built factory) - it replicates itself, subtly altering the replicants to become more specialised along a growth path that will make one new machine produce stuff that will eventually become a femur, while the other new machine starts building stuff that will eventually become a gluteus maximus.
I've heard of a project where a company set out to create a synthetic bacteria based on the minimal possible DNA, which they could then patent, and use as a base for testing genome manipulation or gene therapy or some such nonsense. Not sure if that's fact or fiction though.
If the "known attack vector" is actually a bug in the Microsoft Windows JPEG handling API, will you still be crowing about Safari 3 for MS Windows being broken? Go have a look at the number of problems that exist for previous versions of Microsoft Windows XP, in particular relating to graphic formats of some kind or another.
Besides, from the screenshot of the crash reporter, it's a null pointer dereference (not a heap overflow) - so sure, it's a remotely exploitable denial of service attack, but the browser crashes because the software has detected a problem and decides that the safest way out is to dump core. Let's all go tell the world how broken Safari 3 for MS Windows is!
Except that in your "everyone loses" scenario, Intel still wins because they never actually shipped any product, but they succeeded in blocking one of their competitors from entering a new market.
Microsoft doing something out of the goodness of their heart is like America supporting the sovereingty of other nations.
My suspicion is that part of the ANSI standards approval process involves red tape that Microsoft is hoping will smother ODF for long enough that Microsoft's competing standard will get some kind of head start in the marketplace.
Not only will they choose option B, they'll claim the cost of destroying the "compromised" disks and manufacturing new stock as losses due to piracy, to further lobby the Government to introduce more draconian Copyright legislation.
Maps, and thus Sat Navs, are "best effort" systems. I regularly go hiking (as in, camping out away from cities, electricity and broadband) using maps where aerial photography was done in 1965, and the last field revision was in 1973. The first thing we were taught in Boy Scouts (because back then it was Boy Scouts, no girls) with regards to maps was, "if the map disagrees with reality, it's the map that is wrong." So I'm quite happy to plan a route, then change that route when in the field, because the map is wrong.
Why should Sat Nav be held to some higher standard? There is more information going into a Sat Nav than a normal paper map - this means more data points which could be wrong. As an example, Google Maps shows roads in Deception Bay, Queensland to be about 20 metres off where the satellite photos claim they are - which is right, the overlay or the photo? Or are they both wrong, and the real road is somewhere else entirely?
Perhaps what needs to happen is that Sat Nav companies should have some indicator on their screen of the last time a route-checker drove the route that you are being directed over. For example, fade the routes out as they get towards 6 months old. Indicate to the user that the route they are following has never been checked by a human.
Absent such information, it is best to assume that Sat Nav routes are synthetic and have never actually been followed by a human before your current trip.
And never, ever, let your common sense be overruled by a Sat Nav. If the navigator says, "drive straight ahead for 5km" and you're looking down the side of a rocky slope the likes of which you have never personally traversed, just find another route.
If there were no copyright encumberances, the object code could legally be reverse engineered into some sort of source, commented by people who know their schtick, and then released into the public domain.
All source is released in some shape or form. If you give me an executable without the source files you built it from, it is technically possible to reverse engineer that executable, rework that into readable source, and have "the source" available to debug the program.
Thus in a world without copyright and reverse-engineering restrictions, all source is open.
The 50% split occurs at the median, not the mean. In a "normal distribution", the median and the mean might be close together. The IQ of the population might be more like a gamma distribution: the median is below the mean, with a long, shallow tail of people off into the "genius" axis. Whatever the distribution looks like, the correct statement is that "half the population is below median X" where X is the score of interest.
I don't believe that intelligence or education have as much impact upon belief systems as schooling (indoctrination, rote learning, opinions statements from authority figures).
I can actually hear the "at your expense" yelling at me from behind the thin façade of those simple letters.
But what's this about a nigh-million dollar (six figure) PC? Or is this guy being typically American and counting the PC's value in cents to inflate the implied value by two orders of magnitude? There's a huge difference between a $900,000 PC and a $9,000.00 PC...
Slashdot Mirror
I look forward to reading your (posthumous) biography after you die from cell rot in Guantanamo bay, or one of the secret prisons the USA doesn't have in various European, Asian and Oriental countries.
I use Safari on Mac OS X. Every time I click an adword, it directs me to some intermediate page which then goes nowhere.
So I wonder how many "false non-clicks" they get from people like me? And then how many of my "copy the URL and paste it into the address bar" workarounds are they counting as "false clicks"?
Hydroelectric is the most expensive form of electricity generation, followed closedly by wind power, then nuclear, with gas and coal falling way, way down the list.
The main benefit of hydroelectric power is that it can be stopped and started so quickly. The coal and gas plants take the best part of an hour to ramp up or down, so you use the hydroelectric plan to carry the burden until the more efficient (and slow, cumbersome) plants come up to speed.
Of course, if you live in a country that has to import most of its coal from Australia, especially if you live in a mountainout region with a high annual rainfall, the story may be different.
The high cost of nuclear power is what is driving the Howard government to consider "carbon tax" on all coal and gas fired power plants, so that the nuclear plants that Little Johnny wants so desperately can be built by commercial interests without extensive government subsidies.
All of this is extremely off topic, of course. I expect the burough's true motivation for denying Apple's request to convert three parking meters to a "no parking" zone is the loss of parking fine income.
If you had a Windows machine, you'd realise that the patch Tuesday actually happened on Thursday.
I am not aware of any telecommunications system in the world that has not reached its five-nines reliability rating through trial and error. Earthquake shakes all the phones off the hook in a major city, leading to your telephone exchanges crashing because noone thought of the situation of 1 million people simultaneously trying to listen to the dial tone? You learn, and write around the error (in the simplest case, simply stop giving dialtone once you're already serving dialtone to the first hundred thousand phones, and tell the administrator that something is afoot).
What effectively happened to Skype is that they got Slashdotted. But this was Slashdotting done properly - there was no fascinating article on a geek blog that led hundreds of thousands of people to a particular site in the course of half an hour. This was a vendor-enforced reboot which leds millions of people to a particular Internet service. Microsoft is to Slashdot as Caterpillar D9 is to hand trowel.
It's not Microsoft's fault that Skype crashed, but Microsoft's peculiar habit of forcing millions of consumer PCs to peform exactly the same Internet-based operation at the same time certainly highlighted a flaw in Skype's networking model.
As for the outage lasting for three days... in the case of a Slashdotting, the people visiting the site after it's melted down will see the "service unavailable" message and think, "Cool! Slashdotted already!". The software responsible for melting down Skype's infrastructure was just continually trying to connect over and over again. The moment the servers were up, they were no doubt being hit by thousands of authentication requests per second, which would bring them right back down again.
When you are Slashdotted, you get a short-term, extreme rise in traffic. This traffic then peters out and returns to "normal" levels after a day or so (the article leading to the Slashdotting has been read by all subscribers). What happened in this case was that automatic connection attempts were being repeated over and over again by software that was configured to connect as soon as the computer was turned on. Thus the traffic would have risen to a certain maximum within the first few hours, and then stayed there until some authentication requests were approved. Once the first batch of nodes were authenticated and new nodes were able to retrieve the seed information, I expect the load would have dropped exponentially.
Since this was an operating system and some service software that was responsible for the endless connect requests, I don't expect there would have been any backoff in the load. The OS was rebooted, the software tried to reconnect, and kept trying in the belief that it would eventually get a connection.
So Skype actually got Microsofted.
Now they've fixed their software to cope with this event, should it ever happen again.
That book was the very first thing I thought of when reading the article.
You can produce highly accurate maps, or details of architecture without having one specific person on the ground collecting all that information. I refer you to the Open Street Map project in the first instance, and Sea Dragon in the second. In the Sea Dragon demo, take special note of the discussion about Photosynth, where they construct a surface model of Notre Dame cathedral using hundreds of photos from Flickr.
So how does this apply to Second Life? Well... take the smarts behind Photosynth, the multi-author sythesis of maps from Open Street Map, the shared envrionment of Second Life where multiple people can contribute tiny pieces to one project, and you end up with a means to produce highly detailed maps of places you want to explore. Is it really that great a leap to presume that some groups might be organising this kind of activity? Is it possible to make models of buildings and cities in Second Life that have exactly the detail you need to plan your special operation? Is the detail you need something that you can put into a public space and not raise too much curiosity?
On the other side of the argument - why would terrorists go and set up their own virtual worlds (the hosting! think of the hosting!) when they can use someone else's virtual world, where the work they do adding features into the game is expected as part of the social contract of that game world?
In World of Warcraft, they can work on training the organisational structure. Everyone who has run a raiding guild knows that it's almost like running a business. You train in recruitment, skills, discipline, project planning, dispbursment of funds, resource planning, supervision and follow up reporting. Again, why would they go to a special "terrorist only" space when they can practice these skills where they are expected to have them? Why invest in all the traceable hardware using traceable funds, when they can just be part of a world where all the stuff they want to learn is already expected to happen?
No, I don't expect that terrorists will be trying to fly netherdrakes into buildings any time soon. If you can dismiss that part of the report talking about "World of Warcraft" and "realistic weapons", and accept that these virtual worlds provide excellent grounds for training specific skills, then the whole idea of "terrorists r in UR raid, setting U up the bomb" becomes a little more believable.
Then you have to start asking questions like... "how can we distinguish would-be terrorists from the normal populace in these virtual worlds?"
And... "OMG! speling mikstae!"
IBTL, or whatever the Slashdot jargon is these days.
The catch, of course, being that you don't know what information you might want to hide from tomorrow's fascist dictatorship.
...
Today, it was cool to be cruising up and down the mall showing off your car to attract eligible young ladies. Tomorrow, after the oil runs out, all those people cruising up and down the mall become retrospectively guilty of various emissions breaches, and crimes against the environment. Or maybe it turns out that the mall was also a favourite gathering spot for the scapegoat religious community du jour (Jews, Irish Catholics, Scientologists). So someone gets busy extracting that information from the database, and suddenly just because you were cruising for chicks, you now become a suspected Irish Catholic sympathiser.
Of course, fast forward a few years and it might not be Irish Catholics who are the focus of our terrorist fears. Maybe you'll be a terror suspect because you were driving through a predominantly Buddhist neighbourhood. Or your car spent too long parked in the vicinity of a Labour Party member's house.
And God forbid you happen to come back to Australia after performing these unsavoury acts - you've seen what we do to people who give half used prepaid SIM cards to their friends in other countries! Imagine if you went to the UK, and while you stayed there you gave a Irish Catholic a lift because his bomb of a car blew up?
(in Australian slang, a "bomb" is a car that is barely worth repairing, and a car "blowing up" means that something has broken that requires more than a pair of stockings and fencing wire to repair)
No, this surveillance system does not seem sensible to me. What happens if we put the "what if you commit a crime later" shoe on the ohter foot? I reach the conclusion that the only reason you'd want to track everyone's movements now is to allow you to generate scapegoats later on! When they came for the Communists, I didn't speak up because I'm not a Communist, yadda yadda
The first question when considering new legislation or "crime fighting tools" is not "how will this make life better when used correctly" but "what impact will this have on our community if abused?"
What's this stuff that everyone's talking about with "ads by Google" way off the right of the search result?
Any time I search Google, I only ever get "organic" results in the main portion of the page, with a "Sponsored links" column over to the left. I've visited all the links in the main portion and they seem legit.
Can someone suggest a search term that will produce anything that looks like a sponsored link (ie: "non-organic" in the ACCC's lingo)? Perhaps the stealth ads are only visible to IE users?
ROFLMAO!
Do they ask you to submit the computer to a third party security consultant every day you leave the office? Or just that last time when you've already sanitised the machine by loading Mac OS X onto it fresh? And conveniently hidden your 2GB thumb drive with the Death Star plans in the crevice of some robot's carapace?
You will, of course, be taking steps to blatantly and flagrantly violate these stupid rules, won't you? If it was a company laptop they wouldn't have all these nasty Microsoft bogeymen terrifying them in their sleep...
I think Blizzard needs to wise up and cash in on the market that they've created.
There's a WoW Mastercard. Why can't they have a novel rewards program - spend $100 on your WoW Mastercard, get 100g in game! It's better than any other reward point system out there because there is no negotiation to be made with third party suppliers, no real money cost to the company, and a very big incentive to get people to use your Mastercard programme.
If the gold was so easily available from the game publisher, the RMT market would evaporate. Who would you trust more - this website in China asking for your credit card details, or Blizzard offering you in-game money when you make your regular groceries and comestibles purchase using your WoW Mastercard?
On the other hand, a player-to-player RMT system would allow me to turn my addiction into some extra drinks money...
So I wonder if a device like this will eventually become the standard to replace smart cards, fingerprint readers, etc. Store your crypto material on this device, and present a crypto API via the USB port. No longer will you need to shuffle sensitive crypto material around on your desktop box very carefully lest it be written to swap in cleartext.
Now all you need is that alpha source and a USB Gieger counter...
In laymans terms, the "Junk DNA" provides the bootstrap routine and program code of an life form building nano-machine. The "Gene DNA" provides the instructions to the life-form-building-machine on how to make this life form a "human" or "fly" or "bacteria".
Papers such as A minimal gene set for cellular life derived by comparison of complete bacterial genomes provide some first steps into understanding how all this DNA works together.
And to the grandparent post - I would argue that the "junk DNA" is not the data segment. For decades we've been thinking of the "Gene DNA" as the program when it is in fact the input data, while the "Junk DNA" is the boot loader, operating system and interpreter. But the machine doesn't build stuff and then move on (like a human-built factory) - it replicates itself, subtly altering the replicants to become more specialised along a growth path that will make one new machine produce stuff that will eventually become a femur, while the other new machine starts building stuff that will eventually become a gluteus maximus.
I've heard of a project where a company set out to create a synthetic bacteria based on the minimal possible DNA, which they could then patent, and use as a base for testing genome manipulation or gene therapy or some such nonsense. Not sure if that's fact or fiction though.
If the "known attack vector" is actually a bug in the Microsoft Windows JPEG handling API, will you still be crowing about Safari 3 for MS Windows being broken? Go have a look at the number of problems that exist for previous versions of Microsoft Windows XP, in particular relating to graphic formats of some kind or another.
a ult6.asp?VName=(MS06-078)+Vulnerability+in+Windows +Media+Format+Could+Allow+Remote+Code+Execution+(9 23689)
Besides, from the screenshot of the crash reporter, it's a null pointer dereference (not a heap overflow) - so sure, it's a remotely exploitable denial of service attack, but the browser crashes because the software has detected a problem and decides that the safest way out is to dump core. Let's all go tell the world how broken Safari 3 for MS Windows is!
For example: http://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/secadvisories/def
Have fun.
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/chris/2004/08/10/t he_doctor_many_believe_can_cure_cancer.htm
Or is this just the same (quackery|alternative treatement) in a different guise?
Except that in your "everyone loses" scenario, Intel still wins because they never actually shipped any product, but they succeeded in blocking one of their competitors from entering a new market.
Microsoft doing something out of the goodness of their heart is like America supporting the sovereingty of other nations.
My suspicion is that part of the ANSI standards approval process involves red tape that Microsoft is hoping will smother ODF for long enough that Microsoft's competing standard will get some kind of head start in the marketplace.
Not only will they choose option B, they'll claim the cost of destroying the "compromised" disks and manufacturing new stock as losses due to piracy, to further lobby the Government to introduce more draconian Copyright legislation.
Begging the question, will George take a dive for Bill?
Maps, and thus Sat Navs, are "best effort" systems. I regularly go hiking (as in, camping out away from cities, electricity and broadband) using maps where aerial photography was done in 1965, and the last field revision was in 1973. The first thing we were taught in Boy Scouts (because back then it was Boy Scouts, no girls) with regards to maps was, "if the map disagrees with reality, it's the map that is wrong." So I'm quite happy to plan a route, then change that route when in the field, because the map is wrong.
Why should Sat Nav be held to some higher standard? There is more information going into a Sat Nav than a normal paper map - this means more data points which could be wrong. As an example, Google Maps shows roads in Deception Bay, Queensland to be about 20 metres off where the satellite photos claim they are - which is right, the overlay or the photo? Or are they both wrong, and the real road is somewhere else entirely?
Perhaps what needs to happen is that Sat Nav companies should have some indicator on their screen of the last time a route-checker drove the route that you are being directed over. For example, fade the routes out as they get towards 6 months old. Indicate to the user that the route they are following has never been checked by a human.
Absent such information, it is best to assume that Sat Nav routes are synthetic and have never actually been followed by a human before your current trip.
And never, ever, let your common sense be overruled by a Sat Nav. If the navigator says, "drive straight ahead for 5km" and you're looking down the side of a rocky slope the likes of which you have never personally traversed, just find another route.
No, he didn't buy shares in a training company - he wrote a book on user security training. See the link at the bottom of TFA.
If there were no copyright encumberances, the object code could legally be reverse engineered into some sort of source, commented by people who know their schtick, and then released into the public domain.
All source is released in some shape or form. If you give me an executable without the source files you built it from, it is technically possible to reverse engineer that executable, rework that into readable source, and have "the source" available to debug the program.
Thus in a world without copyright and reverse-engineering restrictions, all source is open.
The 50% split occurs at the median, not the mean. In a "normal distribution", the median and the mean might be close together. The IQ of the population might be more like a gamma distribution: the median is below the mean, with a long, shallow tail of people off into the "genius" axis. Whatever the distribution looks like, the correct statement is that "half the population is below median X" where X is the score of interest.
I don't believe that intelligence or education have as much impact upon belief systems as schooling (indoctrination, rote learning, opinions statements from authority figures).
I love the part about "I'll send the plane ..."
...
I can actually hear the "at your expense" yelling at me from behind the thin façade of those simple letters.
But what's this about a nigh-million dollar (six figure) PC? Or is this guy being typically American and counting the PC's value in cents to inflate the implied value by two orders of magnitude? There's a huge difference between a $900,000 PC and a $9,000.00 PC