Evidently, mRemote is orphanware, although it appears it was forked into mRemoteNG. Sets up an interesting idea - what if mRemote was just a way to set up access to non-Windows systems from malware that first exploits one of the seemingly-endless entry points into Windows.
While you are theoretically correct, you are real-world dead-in-the-water. A big problem with getting science funding these days is what I'll call the Golden Fleece Award Effect (for Sen. William Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award - wikipdeida it). While funding organizations are well aware that a solid negative result in a difficult research area is just as pertinent and useful as a positive one, Congress (the source of all funding) doesn't understand it and doesn't like it. Money out needs to be balanced by succes in. I know many researchers who do 90% of the research needed for a given NSF (or NASA) proposal before they propose it so they can (a) show it will indeed result in success, and (b) it will succeed so they can get more NSF funding. Nothing breeds lack of funding like failure. This is a dumb-ass way to do science, but since all funding comes from the Kingdom of the Dumbasses you get what you'd expect.
This will be useful to patients when there's something that can really be done for them once the early diagnosis is made. Right now all of the actions that can be taken are in the "we hope this will slow down the symptoms" category, and the sad fact is that it's hard to even prove that (unless you ask a Big Pharma marketing agent). The big concern is how organizations like medical insurance companies will use such information to the detriment of the patient, as in resulting in sky-high premiums if they can get insurance at all. My wife has MS, and she can't get long-term care insurance at any price. I have a family history of Alzheimer's, but my brother and I have both decided that we won't take any tests of this nature until there's a gain for us to balance out the risk of the information being used against us.
Interesting not so much about Miguel but for the many "Score 5: Insightful" comments that mirror my own experience. I tried to make Linux my do-it-all system but all the updates and incompatibilities, particularly with the desktop side of things, drove me batshit crazy. When OS X became mature enough to see what it was going to be I switched to Mac for my desktop and Linux for my workhorse/server. Not that either is anywhere near perfect, but it fits my needs and there are times when you need "It. Just. Works." so you can indeed get shit done. Unless Apple takes OS X over an iOS cliff (which is where it appears headed, unfortunately) I think Linux on the desktop isn't going past the hobbiest/technogeek user as far as installed base is concerned (Yeah, I know, your old grandmother rolls her own kernel patches. The rest of us have work to do.)
As others have pointed out, the goal for this legislation is to get everyone using the roads to help pay for them via a "use tax" rather than from general taxes. This is a trend (a bad one, in my view) pushed heavily by the Right and by Libertarians. Basic idea is "I don't use it, so I don't pay for it" where "it" can be schools, bridges in another town, firemen (when my house isn't on fire), etc. This concept is, IMHO, what's pulling this country apart as a community and turning us into little enclaves of selfishness that remind me of the seagulls in the movie "Finding Nemo" (as in "mine mine minemineminemine..."). I'm not sure this is progress.
OK, this is like saying "everyone who posts on/. are worthless pieces of shiat" just because of the few boneheads like yourself who make wild sweeping assertions based on too little data. This database is clearly a serious problem that needs to be handled much more carefully than it probably is, but I know and have worked with a lot of these "local school administrators" you think so little of and most of them are underpaid, overworked, and care deeply about the children in their care. Often they care more than some of the parents involved. As someone else points out, the laws in this case come from the Bozoids in DC. That's where the real problem lies.
The second article notes that agencies can withhold papers that for protection of economic or national security. While this limitation might be reasonable if the order covers all Government-sponsored research, it only covers that research which has been published. If by "published" the order means "published in a public-domain journal" and the aim is to simply bring Government-sponsored research out from behind journal paywalls, then the research had already been screened by the funding agency to make sure nothing that needed such protection was released. So, any "bad guys" would already have access to the information simply by having a subscription to the journals in question. Thus, this is, or should be, a non-issue. If "published" includes reports submitted to the Government as part of contract requirements (status and final reports), that could be more problematic as these are not all generally releaseable. However, I think what's being addressed here is the issue of bringing research out from behind paywalls, something that should not have any problems meeting "protection of security" issues and has been a long time coming.
The real problem is that this insanity/stupidity spills over into other states because the textbook publishers are very aware of this fact. My kids get shit-for-brains textbooks because some idiot in Texas that I can't vote out of office has a choke-hold on what's taught as "science" in this doomed country of ours. I'm really beginning to think that drinking (or smoking some fine cannibis) is not a problem, it's a solution.
One aspect of this is the relative popularity of the various music genres, a factor that is independent of (or at times anti-correlated with) the quality. In the new model, popular means more money, while higher quality might not. In the bad old days, many of the major labels took some of the money they made off of the popular genres and used that to subsidize not-so-popular genres such as classical and jazz. My brother plays in a symphony orchestra, and he has watched the support for his orchestra drop as the labels stop this “transfer of wealth” (if you will). The non-popular genres will eventually die out if the new model continues on as it is. All we’ll have left is Justin Beiber and The Spice Girls.
WIlliam Gibson had a chainsaw-wielding robot in "Mona Lisa Overdrive" and another one with an acetylene torch stinger in its tail. Some radical iron-mongery.
The problem is software, and the people who write it (us), not the hardware. I first ran into the "short time" issue in the 1970s working with coded data that used one digit for the year. So, we had a roll-over problem between 1979 and 1980. I learned then to only use things like "seconds since some date" for internal calculations and use YYYYMMDD HHMMSS.xxxxx (or something similar) for all external date/times - to files, shipping to another system, etc. Yeah, that breaks at year 10,000, but I'll let someone else worry about that. Bottom line is that programmers have to think about everything that might break and what they might do to avoid it. Yes, I have costs of converting between external and internal representations, but with carefully tested (and used many times) routines for the conversion this is a problem my codes do not have. Other problems, yes, but not this one.
Yes, the USAF has flown polar-orbiting weather satellites since the 1960s (the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, or DMSP). That program is in even worse shape than the NOAA program because of a horrifically run/financed attempt to merge the NOAA and USAF prorgrams (overseen by NASA, the spoiled child of Government science) over the past decade (google NPOESS). The USAF and NOAA systems as they now exist are at most barely compatible and have different goals. There is some overlap, which will undoubtably be used if the NOAA satellites all die and there are still healthy DMSP satellite flying, but that's a thin reed. Also, the USAF has no geostationary weather satellites, which do much of the heavy lifting for hurricane tracking. NOAA runs all of those. The answer for all of this is for Congress to grow up and make some unpopular (with their rabid base) decisions.
The only way this will turn around is a buyer's revolt. Nobody really "needs" what Big Media and Big Content are selling. Like-to-have, yes, but need: no. Just get a big enough block of consumers to stop consuming until this craziness stops and things will eventually change direction. However, given that the Comsumer is a teen-age girl with too much money and serious peer pressure issues, this will happen about the same day that leaders in this country start leading again. As long as the money keeps rolling in, the Bigs don't give a rip how the 10% of people who know how to use their brains think - it doesn't matter to them. So, we'll keep on heading down this road and eventually you won't even be able to license something for more than a one-time use. Everything will be on the juke-box, pay-per-play business model.
2. Failing to get #1, go with (a) connect wireless-controlled shock collar to tender part of user's body, (b) toggle shock collar if any error is encountered.
If you don't start with #1, you'll either get there eventually via a Pavlovian response to #2 or the user will stop trying. A win-win situation.
Really? I don't see an automated pilot handling that emergency landing in the Hudson River several years ago, nor handling that situation many years ago when a plane lost most of it's controls and was crash landed in Iowa saving the lives of many people on board. My concern with drones is not privacy so much as it is safety. I do not like the idea of unpiloted aircraft in the commercial airspace of this country except on very limited and very critical (not watching OJ run from the law) purposes, and I will never get on an airplane that does not have a live pilot in the cockpit who will die with me if the plane goes down.
As soon as I heard this I was happy. I am a computer user. I don't gaze at my computer fondly and I don't use it to access content and I could give a rat's ass if it looks like some 1920s calendar (unless there's a Vargas girl on the front!). I want the computer to help me do my job and otherwise get the (expletive deleted) out of the way. I am hoping this will mean some time and effort spent on fixing some of the oddball things that haven't worked right in OS X for far too long. Let the Content Eaters get their rocks off on their iPads and iPhones, but a desktop machine is made for heavy-duty work, be it graphics design or down-to-the-metal coding. I don't want pretty and I don't want cute - I want works and doesn't need constant maintenance (which is why I'm off the Linux desktop). I'm probably reading in to this more than I should, but I hope at least some of what I'm reading is right.
Just a thought. Perhaps given the fact that cybersecurity is impossible from a practical standpoint, maybe we should be thinking about taking things off the 'net. By "practical standpoint" I mean folding in reality factors like low-bid contract policies, cronyism, people who give away their passwords, etc. I am giving serious consideration to taking all my personal financial activities offline (or as much so as my financial institutions will let me), and maybe it's time this philosophy is given equal time with the rush to make all things accessible from the Internet (with all its tubes and pipes). For starters, any system with things like people's SSN on them are NOT reachable by the Internet. This won't avoid idiots losing laptops full of information, but it does close down remote inroads to the information (or access to control of things like power grids). Granted that it's nice to have full access all-the-time to everything, but perhaps since we can't protect the things that need protecting this is too costly a desire to meet.
Given the uber-paranoid viewpoint of the Dept of Defense on things computer, does anyone know if Kaspersky's AV is not allowed on DOD computer systems? Not that the guys/gals running DOD cybersecurity are perfect and on top of things, but the are paranoid enough to be worried about KAV if they see K's involvement with the Russion government and/or crime syndicates as a potential problem.
I've been working on ionospheric impacts on GPS damn near since GPS was launched. Comments:
1. Ten meters is indeed not a hell of a lot until you consider things like (a) your average airport runway is likely not much more than 20 meters in width, particularly in areas where there probably isn't other forms of landing assistance and GPS is needed, and (b) while ten meters horizontally can be OK, ten meters vertically can be brutally bad if you're trying to land an airplane in bad weather and are depending on GPS to tell you where you are. You either fly into the ground or "flare" for landing 10 meters too high. Not good in either case.
2. DGPS can help, but only if the ionospheric disruption is such that it throws the DGPS base station off the same amount (and direction) as the users GPS. This is not necessarily a good assumption to make, and is still being researched. The ionospheric scintillation discussed in TFA is a problem for DGPS.
3. This is mainly a problem for non-static GPS uses. Surveryors typically take a long-term GPS position measurement (at minimum several minutes) which will, if done correctly, smooth through the big errors caused by ionospheric disruptions. The main problem is dynamic uses of GPS, like on aircraft, where you can't linger around to integrate up a good position solution.
Bottom line is that GPS isn't quite the "all weather system" it was cracked up to be. Lots of time and effort has gone into trying to resolve ionospheric impacts on GPS over the past several decades. Again, typically not a problem for lots of applications, but a potentially serious problem for dynamic position/velocity GPS users.
All this focus on the released details of the bad things that will happen to each agency is a waste of energy. The administration put this document together because Congress insisted on it, and if it had been dropped in my lap I would have done as litle as necessary to put this useless exercise in budgetary masturbation together. This is all focusing on the "trees" of "OMG, my favorite NASA program will be axed" when it should be on the forrest of "DAMN, Congress is about to put a shotgun to the head of the US economy and pull the trigger." We should be furious about the short-sighted, infantile, "he's touching me" inability to work together of what passes for leadership in Congress, particularly on the REPUBLICAN (there, I said it) side of the aisle. NASA losing $1.3B is a candle against the general confligration this disaster will cause to the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Evidently, mRemote is orphanware, although it appears it was forked into mRemoteNG. Sets up an interesting idea - what if mRemote was just a way to set up access to non-Windows systems from malware that first exploits one of the seemingly-endless entry points into Windows.
While you are theoretically correct, you are real-world dead-in-the-water. A big problem with getting science funding these days is what I'll call the Golden Fleece Award Effect (for Sen. William Proxmire's Golden Fleece Award - wikipdeida it). While funding organizations are well aware that a solid negative result in a difficult research area is just as pertinent and useful as a positive one, Congress (the source of all funding) doesn't understand it and doesn't like it. Money out needs to be balanced by succes in. I know many researchers who do 90% of the research needed for a given NSF (or NASA) proposal before they propose it so they can (a) show it will indeed result in success, and (b) it will succeed so they can get more NSF funding. Nothing breeds lack of funding like failure. This is a dumb-ass way to do science, but since all funding comes from the Kingdom of the Dumbasses you get what you'd expect.
This will be useful to patients when there's something that can really be done for them once the early diagnosis is made. Right now all of the actions that can be taken are in the "we hope this will slow down the symptoms" category, and the sad fact is that it's hard to even prove that (unless you ask a Big Pharma marketing agent). The big concern is how organizations like medical insurance companies will use such information to the detriment of the patient, as in resulting in sky-high premiums if they can get insurance at all. My wife has MS, and she can't get long-term care insurance at any price. I have a family history of Alzheimer's, but my brother and I have both decided that we won't take any tests of this nature until there's a gain for us to balance out the risk of the information being used against us.
Interesting not so much about Miguel but for the many "Score 5: Insightful" comments that mirror my own experience. I tried to make Linux my do-it-all system but all the updates and incompatibilities, particularly with the desktop side of things, drove me batshit crazy. When OS X became mature enough to see what it was going to be I switched to Mac for my desktop and Linux for my workhorse/server. Not that either is anywhere near perfect, but it fits my needs and there are times when you need "It. Just. Works." so you can indeed get shit done. Unless Apple takes OS X over an iOS cliff (which is where it appears headed, unfortunately) I think Linux on the desktop isn't going past the hobbiest/technogeek user as far as installed base is concerned (Yeah, I know, your old grandmother rolls her own kernel patches. The rest of us have work to do.)
As others have pointed out, the goal for this legislation is to get everyone using the roads to help pay for them via a "use tax" rather than from general taxes. This is a trend (a bad one, in my view) pushed heavily by the Right and by Libertarians. Basic idea is "I don't use it, so I don't pay for it" where "it" can be schools, bridges in another town, firemen (when my house isn't on fire), etc. This concept is, IMHO, what's pulling this country apart as a community and turning us into little enclaves of selfishness that remind me of the seagulls in the movie "Finding Nemo" (as in "mine mine minemineminemine ..."). I'm not sure this is progress.
OK, this is like saying "everyone who posts on /. are worthless pieces of shiat" just because of the few boneheads like yourself who make wild sweeping assertions based on too little data. This database is clearly a serious problem that needs to be handled much more carefully than it probably is, but I know and have worked with a lot of these "local school administrators" you think so little of and most of them are underpaid, overworked, and care deeply about the children in their care. Often they care more than some of the parents involved. As someone else points out, the laws in this case come from the Bozoids in DC. That's where the real problem lies.
The second article notes that agencies can withhold papers that for protection of economic or national security. While this limitation might be reasonable if the order covers all Government-sponsored research, it only covers that research which has been published. If by "published" the order means "published in a public-domain journal" and the aim is to simply bring Government-sponsored research out from behind journal paywalls, then the research had already been screened by the funding agency to make sure nothing that needed such protection was released. So, any "bad guys" would already have access to the information simply by having a subscription to the journals in question. Thus, this is, or should be, a non-issue. If "published" includes reports submitted to the Government as part of contract requirements (status and final reports), that could be more problematic as these are not all generally releaseable. However, I think what's being addressed here is the issue of bringing research out from behind paywalls, something that should not have any problems meeting "protection of security" issues and has been a long time coming.
The real problem is that this insanity/stupidity spills over into other states because the textbook publishers are very aware of this fact. My kids get shit-for-brains textbooks because some idiot in Texas that I can't vote out of office has a choke-hold on what's taught as "science" in this doomed country of ours. I'm really beginning to think that drinking (or smoking some fine cannibis) is not a problem, it's a solution.
One aspect of this is the relative popularity of the various music genres, a factor that is independent of (or at times anti-correlated with) the quality. In the new model, popular means more money, while higher quality might not. In the bad old days, many of the major labels took some of the money they made off of the popular genres and used that to subsidize not-so-popular genres such as classical and jazz. My brother plays in a symphony orchestra, and he has watched the support for his orchestra drop as the labels stop this “transfer of wealth” (if you will). The non-popular genres will eventually die out if the new model continues on as it is. All we’ll have left is Justin Beiber and The Spice Girls.
WIlliam Gibson had a chainsaw-wielding robot in "Mona Lisa Overdrive" and another one with an acetylene torch stinger in its tail. Some radical iron-mongery.
Either "Hunt the Wumpus" or Basic.
The problem is software, and the people who write it (us), not the hardware. I first ran into the "short time" issue in the 1970s working with coded data that used one digit for the year. So, we had a roll-over problem between 1979 and 1980. I learned then to only use things like "seconds since some date" for internal calculations and use YYYYMMDD HHMMSS.xxxxx (or something similar) for all external date/times - to files, shipping to another system, etc. Yeah, that breaks at year 10,000, but I'll let someone else worry about that. Bottom line is that programmers have to think about everything that might break and what they might do to avoid it. Yes, I have costs of converting between external and internal representations, but with carefully tested (and used many times) routines for the conversion this is a problem my codes do not have. Other problems, yes, but not this one.
Yes, the USAF has flown polar-orbiting weather satellites since the 1960s (the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program, or DMSP). That program is in even worse shape than the NOAA program because of a horrifically run/financed attempt to merge the NOAA and USAF prorgrams (overseen by NASA, the spoiled child of Government science) over the past decade (google NPOESS). The USAF and NOAA systems as they now exist are at most barely compatible and have different goals. There is some overlap, which will undoubtably be used if the NOAA satellites all die and there are still healthy DMSP satellite flying, but that's a thin reed. Also, the USAF has no geostationary weather satellites, which do much of the heavy lifting for hurricane tracking. NOAA runs all of those. The answer for all of this is for Congress to grow up and make some unpopular (with their rabid base) decisions.
The only way this will turn around is a buyer's revolt. Nobody really "needs" what Big Media and Big Content are selling. Like-to-have, yes, but need: no. Just get a big enough block of consumers to stop consuming until this craziness stops and things will eventually change direction. However, given that the Comsumer is a teen-age girl with too much money and serious peer pressure issues, this will happen about the same day that leaders in this country start leading again. As long as the money keeps rolling in, the Bigs don't give a rip how the 10% of people who know how to use their brains think - it doesn't matter to them. So, we'll keep on heading down this road and eventually you won't even be able to license something for more than a one-time use. Everything will be on the juke-box, pay-per-play business model.
1. Smarter users.
2. Failing to get #1, go with (a) connect wireless-controlled shock collar to tender part of user's body, (b) toggle shock collar if any error is encountered.
If you don't start with #1, you'll either get there eventually via a Pavlovian response to #2 or the user will stop trying. A win-win situation.
Well, looks like those two "NURP" lines, in a different ink and a different hand, look like they might be pidgeon IDs. For example, see:
http://www.pdsa.org.uk/about-us/animal-bravery-awards/dickin-medal-pigeons
FSM knows what that might mean, but it could tie the message to other birds.
... in Microsoft's corner: Win95, Bob, Zune, Vista, big serious backed-by-the-bosses stuff.
... from the folks who brought you the Zune ... THE ZONE!
Really? I don't see an automated pilot handling that emergency landing in the Hudson River several years ago, nor handling that situation many years ago when a plane lost most of it's controls and was crash landed in Iowa saving the lives of many people on board. My concern with drones is not privacy so much as it is safety. I do not like the idea of unpiloted aircraft in the commercial airspace of this country except on very limited and very critical (not watching OJ run from the law) purposes, and I will never get on an airplane that does not have a live pilot in the cockpit who will die with me if the plane goes down.
As soon as I heard this I was happy. I am a computer user. I don't gaze at my computer fondly and I don't use it to access content and I could give a rat's ass if it looks like some 1920s calendar (unless there's a Vargas girl on the front!). I want the computer to help me do my job and otherwise get the (expletive deleted) out of the way. I am hoping this will mean some time and effort spent on fixing some of the oddball things that haven't worked right in OS X for far too long. Let the Content Eaters get their rocks off on their iPads and iPhones, but a desktop machine is made for heavy-duty work, be it graphics design or down-to-the-metal coding. I don't want pretty and I don't want cute - I want works and doesn't need constant maintenance (which is why I'm off the Linux desktop). I'm probably reading in to this more than I should, but I hope at least some of what I'm reading is right.
Just a thought. Perhaps given the fact that cybersecurity is impossible from a practical standpoint, maybe we should be thinking about taking things off the 'net. By "practical standpoint" I mean folding in reality factors like low-bid contract policies, cronyism, people who give away their passwords, etc. I am giving serious consideration to taking all my personal financial activities offline (or as much so as my financial institutions will let me), and maybe it's time this philosophy is given equal time with the rush to make all things accessible from the Internet (with all its tubes and pipes). For starters, any system with things like people's SSN on them are NOT reachable by the Internet. This won't avoid idiots losing laptops full of information, but it does close down remote inroads to the information (or access to control of things like power grids). Granted that it's nice to have full access all-the-time to everything, but perhaps since we can't protect the things that need protecting this is too costly a desire to meet.
Given the uber-paranoid viewpoint of the Dept of Defense on things computer, does anyone know if Kaspersky's AV is not allowed on DOD computer systems? Not that the guys/gals running DOD cybersecurity are perfect and on top of things, but the are paranoid enough to be worried about KAV if they see K's involvement with the Russion government and/or crime syndicates as a potential problem.
I've been working on ionospheric impacts on GPS damn near since GPS was launched. Comments:
1. Ten meters is indeed not a hell of a lot until you consider things like (a) your average airport runway is likely not much more than 20 meters in width, particularly in areas where there probably isn't other forms of landing assistance and GPS is needed, and (b) while ten meters horizontally can be OK, ten meters vertically can be brutally bad if you're trying to land an airplane in bad weather and are depending on GPS to tell you where you are. You either fly into the ground or "flare" for landing 10 meters too high. Not good in either case.
2. DGPS can help, but only if the ionospheric disruption is such that it throws the DGPS base station off the same amount (and direction) as the users GPS. This is not necessarily a good assumption to make, and is still being researched. The ionospheric scintillation discussed in TFA is a problem for DGPS.
3. This is mainly a problem for non-static GPS uses. Surveryors typically take a long-term GPS position measurement (at minimum several minutes) which will, if done correctly, smooth through the big errors caused by ionospheric disruptions. The main problem is dynamic uses of GPS, like on aircraft, where you can't linger around to integrate up a good position solution.
Bottom line is that GPS isn't quite the "all weather system" it was cracked up to be. Lots of time and effort has gone into trying to resolve ionospheric impacts on GPS over the past several decades. Again, typically not a problem for lots of applications, but a potentially serious problem for dynamic position/velocity GPS users.
For a minute there I thought this was a gratuitous shot at The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
All this focus on the released details of the bad things that will happen to each agency is a waste of energy. The administration put this document together because Congress insisted on it, and if it had been dropped in my lap I would have done as litle as necessary to put this useless exercise in budgetary masturbation together. This is all focusing on the "trees" of "OMG, my favorite NASA program will be axed" when it should be on the forrest of "DAMN, Congress is about to put a shotgun to the head of the US economy and pull the trigger." We should be furious about the short-sighted, infantile, "he's touching me" inability to work together of what passes for leadership in Congress, particularly on the REPUBLICAN (there, I said it) side of the aisle. NASA losing $1.3B is a candle against the general confligration this disaster will cause to the US.