According to my lay understanding of the laws around here (Norway), such disclaimers are bullshit. E-mail is like postcards, it's regarded as public. If you transmit confidential information it is your responsibility to encrypt it.
I have been thinking about the same issue, and so I took the chance to educate the people I got this stuff from. What I told them was basically that this virus could well publish confidential information, but what's worse, the design flaws that makes a virus like this possible, also makes possible a deliberate attack on them. Viruses are not really a problem, it's the security flaws that makes them possible that is the problem, and if you use anti-virus software, it means you are aware of the flaw, but you do nothing to fix it.
I also take the opportunity to tell them to drop M$.
Also, it would be a good thing to include books that people can read to understand us. Hackers dictionary, the Hacker Ethic, etc.
I would also recommend Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee. It is not very well written, but it gives insight into some very brilliant ideas that have yet to be implemented, and makes you see how little of the web's real potential that has been realized.
OK. I did some search, and it seems like the pointing error is about 10 mas. What is the pixel scale? About 100 mas? I that case, I guess it is quite sufficient, yes.
Hehe, it's because we physicists have no more reason to be bragging about our statistics than sociologists have. It's because physicists tend to think that "everything is normal" or "everything is Poisson", without making any effort at all to validate it. Not to speak of lacking efforts to show that the test and test statistic you use has anything to do with reality, and therefore you get confidence levels that doesn't have anything to do with reality either...
That's because you have sucky laws and law enforcement. That's an issue of gov't and corps vs. the rights of people. It's a broad issue, and it's an issue that needs to be addressed. All I'm saying is that you should be careful who you make into heroes, heroes tend to let you down.
OK, that makes it more reasonable. I guess I have to read that article....:-) However, to achieve close to twice the resolution, they have to be very sure they are actually shifting with pretty exactly half a pixel, and something tells me that would be difficult (just take the photon statistics).
BTW, there are plans for a new CCD for HST, isn't it?
How do you know it was the U.S. Constitution that was posted? It was encrypted! You must have broken the decryption! You bastard! Somebody should lock you up!;-)
Gebhardt said his team had developed a "resampling technique" that infers a spatial resolution of the Hubble data that is improved by a factor of two,
Hm, claims of improvement in spatial resolution always makes me veeeery skeptical. Unless they can prove that the resampling technique works, by showing that it correctly reproduces an image taken with higher resolution, I just don't believe it. And with galaxies and with the HST (that has pretty much the best resolution right now (until optical interferometers get into "everyday" use)), you can't do that.
That doesn't mean I reject this study, but I would view it with additional skepticism.
Well, the FBI needs to check their passwords once in a while too, don't they?
It's worse that Elcomsoft sells rather nasty spamware.
If it had been idealism, I would have been on the barricade right away, but this is a case of Elcomsoft's money vs. Adobe's money, and I think I'll limit my protest to underwriting petitions, and speak out against the use of PDF.
But you guys need to get rid of DMCA, it is clearly a significant threat to free expression, and I guess this is a good case to use in that fight. Just don't make heros of Elcomsoft.
Essentially, by selling/offering the eBook processor, he's allegedly guilty of offering, providing, and trafficking in a circumvention device on U.S. territory. He was in the U.S., and was thus arrested.
Yes, and that emphasizes Alan Cox' point: Anybody involved in making sure the protocols we use to communicate aren't owned by major corporations must stay away from the U.S.
Here in Norway, the news broke shortly after in Sweden, and the day after, governmental health officials said "nah, this can't be true".
The argument was that Red Bull has a lot less caffeine than coffee, and even if you drink it with e.g. vodka, it isn't very likely to have any effect that wouldn't allready be observed with what is known in certain parts of Norway as "karsk":
Take a cup, put a coin at the bottom fill it with coffee untill you can't see the coin. Fill it with alcohol (vodka or homebrew. Definately homebrew...) so that you can see the coin again, then fill it with coffee untill you can't see the coin. Get pissed.
In nanny states, officials tend to speak their minds. You might want to compare it with privatized nannies. Hell, I've been to theme parks in the U.S. where you can't really do anything before you've got 50 nannies telling you what you can't do. I can tell you, our state-paid nannies are far less stupid than you privately paid nannies.
Well, it is not quite as bad is it sounds. He said he showed them only as an instructional aid. It had to do with CO_2 measured in ice cores, if I remember correctly. They had measured ice cores at many different locations, but only one sample exhibited the "desired" exponential behaviour. So they threw away all except the sample that had the exponential behaviour. Also, to get it to really look exponential, they had to time shift one of the series. I think those who attacked this was, off the top of my head, Heike et al and Segalstad et al.
To the audience, at least to me, the argument that it was just for instructional purposes was very unconvincing. If you need to use a graph that has nothing to do with reality, you don't really have a case.
Was it an actual member of the IPCC or just someone trying to present the IPCC's case?
Good question, I shouldn't be too sure. The moderator gave the impression that he was, but I really don't know.
Besides, we're typically using at least twice as much energy as we need to to accomplish our desired ends, and sometimes 10 times as much.
Oh, yes, I agree completely with that point. We should really cut back on energy consumption. Besides, burning fossil fuel is a terrible waste. Fossil carbon shouldn't be burnt at all, it should be used in e.g. plastic production.
First, slashdot is being misleading. They're talking only about electronic forms of media. The slashdot article doesn't mention that this doesn't apply to paper books. Nor does it mention that some publishers want to move to all digital forms for libraries.
Well, you know, people do click on the link and read the article (you do that, right? Folks, you read the articles? No? Oh well;-) ), and how misleading can the post be when the you will imidiately see the bigger picture when you click on the link. Don't be so hard to them!:-)
Oh, I've been to so many of these debates, I know exactly how they go.
One scientist puts a curve on the overhead saying "this proves conclusively that the climate is warming up", the next puts another curve on the overhead saying "yes, I am of course aware of those data, but they do not take into account that [something], but the following data does". The first comes up with another graph "saying, yes, I understand that analysis, but it ignores that", and then the scientists continue for hours to throw curves at each other, each more convincing to themselves, but less convincing to the audience.
The last time I was to such a debate, it ended when one of the IPCC folks managed to throw a well-known forgery on the overhead. He was caught, and that concluded it.
My position is that climatologists severly underestimate the uncertainty in their statements (as do many other physicists, my own field is severly plagued by it as well).
Better safe than sorry, you understand.
Are you really sure about that? It is very easy to swing public opinion in any direction. It wouldn't be hard to tell people that we need to pour out more CO_2 to prevent the next ice-age, if you had the PR machine to do it. Well, I call myself an environmentalist, and I feel that in the current situation, you'd better make very sure the things you do, don't cause more harm than good. And the only way to do that is to make sure everything you do rests on solid science. What the IPCC has today just isn't it.
Fiber in my house, what to look for?
on
Internet2 Update
·
· Score: 2
This got me thinking:
One huge stumbling block is the so-called "last mile" connection. When the Internet2 faithful talk about broadband, they're speaking of a world where every computer is connected at 100 megabits per second or faster.
Actually, it is quite realistic to get some optical fibers in the house around here now, and I'm considering it.
It will require a fair amount of digging ditches, and you wouldn't want to dig ditches too often, so I have to make sure that what I put in those ditches won't need to be upgraded for many years to come.
So, pretending this is "Ask Slashdot", what are the pitfalls?
Are there certain types of fibre I should stay away from, certain things that would prohibit me from going higher than say, 100Mbits/s, or certain things that will make the physical infrastructure incompatible with everything else?
Ah, bandwidth at the Roque de los Muchachos
on
Internet2 Update
·
· Score: 3
10-meter telescope in the Canary Islands. When it comes online, it too will be hooked to Internet2.
Oh, that's really great! I've been at that site three times (the NOT), and the net connection from the mountain is really bad. It sure needs a lot of improvement. I know they've had some tests where the NOT has been remotely controlled, but it is not for mainstream use. The problem is that you sometimes need to download the picture at once after readout to decide what you should do for the next exposure, but on a slow connection, you will waste a lot of very valuable observing time waiting for an image to download. A typical image is 2048x2048 pixels, 16 bits, pluss header information. Hope we get a bit of that bandwidth the GTC is getting...:-) I've been on the construction site when it was just being dug out.
I have several analysts say that Nokia won the cell-phone market becuase they realized that cell phones was going to be something for the consumer market, while competititors was aiming for the corporate market.
I don't see why PDAs shouldn't do well on the consumer market soon...
I'm really considering getting a PDA, but my main concerns are: Can't be too expensive. It mustn't be too much of a loss if I loose it throw it off a cliff or something like that. Shit happens, you know. Also, it must be flexible and hackable.
I agree, this is very important. The ability to easily make micropayments must become a native part of every browser, and fast
However, this is not the worst part. The worst part is getting banks onto it. They are used to largish transactions, and a much must model is charging quite a bit for every transaction.
It's going to be hard to tell them this won't work. I have been sending my bank e-mail about it.
What we need are truly open, global standards. Around here, several banks are working on their own models. It seems that it will result in they telling web developers to put buttons on their pages, something like "if you have an account in Bank A, click here, if you have an account in Bank B, click here" (my own bank has allready implemented such a solution). This insular behaviour won't do us any good.
Unfortunately, I just saw the W3C has closed their micropayments group. This is very unfortunate, I think. They had a draft that didn't look too bad in Final Call, and several implementations. I don't know why they closed it, I thought it was about to advance to Candidate Recommendation. I guess it might be that the guy who lead that working group was tied up in a lot of other things.
If the Free Software community can develop something, and make it a public domain standard, I think that would be good. I would prefer W3C to do it, but it seems they failed.
I don't agree. I've signed up for Salon Premium for $30 a year, but I would much rather pay Salon by micropayments.
It took me a long time before I decided to sign up, I would so much prefer micropayments because I really don't have much time to read. But then, I realized that Salon just needs the money, badly, and I would hate Salon to go down, so I figured I just couldn't wait any longer. Besides, it is great not having the banner ads there.
I think micropayments are a very big part of the answer, but I think it is a good idea to offer both.
Yeah,, there are many good pages there. I discovered the shutdown yesterday when I visited http://reality.sgi.com/btd/kate-bush/. It's a really good page about the music of Kate Bush, with quite a few rare recordings.
Well, yeah, it is really strange, considering that people tend to use huge e-mail attachments, when it would save a lot of resources dumping it on an URL (behind basic authentication if needed), and send the URL instead. If this had been practiced, most companies could save a lot. So, closing down the employee webserver just don't make any sense from a resource management perspective either.
I can't agree with you there. While pop-ups are very annoying, you can turn them off in good browsers, and it doesn't waste any bandwidth.
Besides, if a site shows you a pop-up once, you have the option of never going there again.
E-mail spam, OTOH, as allready wasted your bandwidth the moment it was put in your mailbox, filters doesn't help to preserve bandwidth.
Remove-lists are obviously not working, so there is no way you can say that you will not hear from the spammers again. So e-mail spam is a lot worse than pop-ups.
Slashdot Mirror
According to my lay understanding of the laws around here (Norway), such disclaimers are bullshit. E-mail is like postcards, it's regarded as public. If you transmit confidential information it is your responsibility to encrypt it.
I also take the opportunity to tell them to drop M$.
Also, it would be a good thing to include books that people can read to understand us. Hackers dictionary, the Hacker Ethic, etc.
I would also recommend Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee. It is not very well written, but it gives insight into some very brilliant ideas that have yet to be implemented, and makes you see how little of the web's real potential that has been realized.
OK. I did some search, and it seems like the pointing error is about 10 mas. What is the pixel scale? About 100 mas? I that case, I guess it is quite sufficient, yes.
Hehe, it's because we physicists have no more reason to be bragging about our statistics than sociologists have. It's because physicists tend to think that "everything is normal" or "everything is Poisson", without making any effort at all to validate it. Not to speak of lacking efforts to show that the test and test statistic you use has anything to do with reality, and therefore you get confidence levels that doesn't have anything to do with reality either...
Nope, they happen in 0.135 % of the experiments to be exact...
That's because you have sucky laws and law enforcement. That's an issue of gov't and corps vs. the rights of people. It's a broad issue, and it's an issue that needs to be addressed. All I'm saying is that you should be careful who you make into heroes, heroes tend to let you down.
Good to hear VLTI is doing so great!
How do you know it was the U.S. Constitution that was posted? It was encrypted! You must have broken the decryption! You bastard! Somebody should lock you up! ;-)
Hm, claims of improvement in spatial resolution always makes me veeeery skeptical. Unless they can prove that the resampling technique works, by showing that it correctly reproduces an image taken with higher resolution, I just don't believe it. And with galaxies and with the HST (that has pretty much the best resolution right now (until optical interferometers get into "everyday" use)), you can't do that.
That doesn't mean I reject this study, but I would view it with additional skepticism.
It's worse that Elcomsoft sells rather nasty spamware.
If it had been idealism, I would have been on the barricade right away, but this is a case of Elcomsoft's money vs. Adobe's money, and I think I'll limit my protest to underwriting petitions, and speak out against the use of PDF.
But you guys need to get rid of DMCA, it is clearly a significant threat to free expression, and I guess this is a good case to use in that fight. Just don't make heros of Elcomsoft.
Yes, and that emphasizes Alan Cox' point: Anybody involved in making sure the protocols we use to communicate aren't owned by major corporations must stay away from the U.S.
The argument was that Red Bull has a lot less caffeine than coffee, and even if you drink it with e.g. vodka, it isn't very likely to have any effect that wouldn't allready be observed with what is known in certain parts of Norway as "karsk":
Take a cup, put a coin at the bottom fill it with coffee untill you can't see the coin. Fill it with alcohol (vodka or homebrew. Definately homebrew...) so that you can see the coin again, then fill it with coffee untill you can't see the coin. Get pissed.
In nanny states, officials tend to speak their minds. You might want to compare it with privatized nannies. Hell, I've been to theme parks in the U.S. where you can't really do anything before you've got 50 nannies telling you what you can't do. I can tell you, our state-paid nannies are far less stupid than you privately paid nannies.
Well, it is not quite as bad is it sounds. He said he showed them only as an instructional aid. It had to do with CO_2 measured in ice cores, if I remember correctly. They had measured ice cores at many different locations, but only one sample exhibited the "desired" exponential behaviour. So they threw away all except the sample that had the exponential behaviour. Also, to get it to really look exponential, they had to time shift one of the series. I think those who attacked this was, off the top of my head, Heike et al and Segalstad et al. To the audience, at least to me, the argument that it was just for instructional purposes was very unconvincing. If you need to use a graph that has nothing to do with reality, you don't really have a case.
Good question, I shouldn't be too sure. The moderator gave the impression that he was, but I really don't know.
Oh, yes, I agree completely with that point. We should really cut back on energy consumption. Besides, burning fossil fuel is a terrible waste. Fossil carbon shouldn't be burnt at all, it should be used in e.g. plastic production.
So how do we do all this?
Well, you know, people do click on the link and read the article (you do that, right? Folks, you read the articles? No? Oh well ;-) ), and how misleading can the post be when the you will imidiately see the bigger picture when you click on the link. Don't be so hard to them! :-)
One scientist puts a curve on the overhead saying "this proves conclusively that the climate is warming up", the next puts another curve on the overhead saying "yes, I am of course aware of those data, but they do not take into account that [something], but the following data does". The first comes up with another graph "saying, yes, I understand that analysis, but it ignores that", and then the scientists continue for hours to throw curves at each other, each more convincing to themselves, but less convincing to the audience.
The last time I was to such a debate, it ended when one of the IPCC folks managed to throw a well-known forgery on the overhead. He was caught, and that concluded it.
My position is that climatologists severly underestimate the uncertainty in their statements (as do many other physicists, my own field is severly plagued by it as well).
Are you really sure about that? It is very easy to swing public opinion in any direction. It wouldn't be hard to tell people that we need to pour out more CO_2 to prevent the next ice-age, if you had the PR machine to do it. Well, I call myself an environmentalist, and I feel that in the current situation, you'd better make very sure the things you do, don't cause more harm than good. And the only way to do that is to make sure everything you do rests on solid science. What the IPCC has today just isn't it.
Actually, it is quite realistic to get some optical fibers in the house around here now, and I'm considering it.
It will require a fair amount of digging ditches, and you wouldn't want to dig ditches too often, so I have to make sure that what I put in those ditches won't need to be upgraded for many years to come.
So, pretending this is "Ask Slashdot", what are the pitfalls?
Are there certain types of fibre I should stay away from, certain things that would prohibit me from going higher than say, 100Mbits/s, or certain things that will make the physical infrastructure incompatible with everything else?
Oh, that's really great! I've been at that site three times (the NOT), and the net connection from the mountain is really bad. It sure needs a lot of improvement. I know they've had some tests where the NOT has been remotely controlled, but it is not for mainstream use. The problem is that you sometimes need to download the picture at once after readout to decide what you should do for the next exposure, but on a slow connection, you will waste a lot of very valuable observing time waiting for an image to download. A typical image is 2048x2048 pixels, 16 bits, pluss header information. Hope we get a bit of that bandwidth the GTC is getting... :-) I've been on the construction site when it was just being dug out.
5 Gy is the rule of thumb figure. I even just asked a passing solar physicist about it... :-)
I don't see why PDAs shouldn't do well on the consumer market soon...
I'm really considering getting a PDA, but my main concerns are: Can't be too expensive. It mustn't be too much of a loss if I loose it throw it off a cliff or something like that. Shit happens, you know. Also, it must be flexible and hackable.
However, this is not the worst part. The worst part is getting banks onto it. They are used to largish transactions, and a much must model is charging quite a bit for every transaction. It's going to be hard to tell them this won't work. I have been sending my bank e-mail about it.
What we need are truly open, global standards. Around here, several banks are working on their own models. It seems that it will result in they telling web developers to put buttons on their pages, something like "if you have an account in Bank A, click here, if you have an account in Bank B, click here" (my own bank has allready implemented such a solution). This insular behaviour won't do us any good.
Unfortunately, I just saw the W3C has closed their micropayments group. This is very unfortunate, I think. They had a draft that didn't look too bad in Final Call, and several implementations. I don't know why they closed it, I thought it was about to advance to Candidate Recommendation. I guess it might be that the guy who lead that working group was tied up in a lot of other things.
If the Free Software community can develop something, and make it a public domain standard, I think that would be good. I would prefer W3C to do it, but it seems they failed.
It took me a long time before I decided to sign up, I would so much prefer micropayments because I really don't have much time to read. But then, I realized that Salon just needs the money, badly, and I would hate Salon to go down, so I figured I just couldn't wait any longer. Besides, it is great not having the banner ads there.
I think micropayments are a very big part of the answer, but I think it is a good idea to offer both.
Yeah,, there are many good pages there. I discovered the shutdown yesterday when I visited http://reality.sgi.com/btd/kate-bush/. It's a really good page about the music of Kate Bush, with quite a few rare recordings.
Well, yeah, it is really strange, considering that people tend to use huge e-mail attachments, when it would save a lot of resources dumping it on an URL (behind basic authentication if needed), and send the URL instead. If this had been practiced, most companies could save a lot. So, closing down the employee webserver just don't make any sense from a resource management perspective either.
E-mail spam, OTOH, as allready wasted your bandwidth the moment it was put in your mailbox, filters doesn't help to preserve bandwidth. Remove-lists are obviously not working, so there is no way you can say that you will not hear from the spammers again. So e-mail spam is a lot worse than pop-ups.