Build a better mouse trap and someone on Slashdot will beat a path to your door... just to tell you that people used to make mouse traps before and that it's therefore old tech.
Well, given that innovation usually means to build new concepts on top of older ideas, or to extent older ideas - innovation means you'll have to defend yourself against other's patents.
Nobody is using actual patent *texts* in order to innovate though:
Patents are basically unreadable for technical people, they are legal not technical documents. If something is actually valuable you've heard about it through other sources.
Patents are usually trivial, to read through the patent document takes more time than to come up with an equal or better solution.
Patents are usually too old. By the time they are actually granted the methods described in them have been in common use for years.
Reading patent literature is dangerous - if you violate a patent knowing that it existed, then your fine could turn out much higher. If you have read about an idea before, you may well use it when encountering a suitable problem - even if you don't remember where or that you read it.
Regarding "Mutually Assured Destruction" - that can only work if there are two parties. If you have hundreds or thousands of parties involved, it's impossible that they could all be balanced against each other. In this case the patent portfolio prevents newcomers from entering the market, so it's very one-sided. And of course a patent portfolio provides virtually no defense against a company which doesn't produce anything - e.g. a law firm which buys patents.
Well, any piece of equipment can fail, and of course you'd expect lightning to do serious damage. However a single failure shouldn't be sufficient to cause an accident. A train being halted and stop signal being raised - that should count as normal operation, not a failure mode. So if train passes a signal which it shouldn't have, there should be a second system which detects this problem.
The article gives the impression that there was only one such system. That would be a design issue. Typically on European railway systems (definitely on HSR lines, but also on many others) there is a separate system which triggers the train's brakes if a driver misses a signal. At a minimum that system should not be triggered by the same pin which controls the light signal. Furthermore I would expect that for HSR, the train's position is reported automatically and can be observed remotely. Somebody should have monitored the situation, noticed that the train had missed a signal and alerted the driver.
I work in automotive safety, so this is not exactly my field - however normally train systems operate to much higher safety standards then cars. (For obvious reasons: the impact of a single crash event is much higher, and the costs on a per passenger basis are much lower.)
Realistically - with 40 people dead, this is nowhere in the range of the death numbers car travel reaches. However people in China seem mainly concerned about the cover-ups, which apparently included attempts to abandon survivors in the wreckage.
That seems like a good focus - the accident should be investigated properly, and the problems should be fixed.
Well Apple isn't really in a monopoly position. You can use e.g. Android products instead. It's legal to leverage your market position as long as you are not a monopoly.
somehow, I assume bad motives. you try to remove all anonymity - but that is BAD for us.
I tried to register a new youtube account - just because I'd like to keep that separate from G+, and was directed to an account confirmation page, asking me to give them my phone number so that they'd send me the confirmation code via SMS. I don't know what they are trying to pull there, but no fucking way.
Well, the guy sucks as a neighbor, he should definitely be punished. However they investigated him thoroughly, and he is clearly bad at covering his tracks - I think by now we can take it for granted that he is not actually a pedophile. (They would have found out, otherwise.) Also I think it's possible that he could be reformed or at least deterred. Whereas if someone has a sexual desire for children he can not really change that, just as I can't really change my sexual preference for women.
It also solely references people's own perceptions - e.g. it doesn't check whether night shift workers actually are more often overweight than their colleagues in the day shift, just that they believe that to be the case. It would be more interesting to have actual weight data. Also there is the issue of causality - for example it's conceivable that someone who has fewer social contacts would be more likely to accept a job on the night shift.
Of course it's very reasonable to assume that night shifts would (on average) impact people negatively - I guess most of us would expect that to hold true. It would be interesting to prove it, though - unfortunately the methodology chosen is unsuitable for that.
Shouldn't word have meaning though? Pedophile = someone who is sexually attracted to prepubescent children. There is nothing in that particular case of downloading which would indicate that he did it because he was sexually interested, and merely kissing a little child is in no way indicative of pedophilia. Sure pedophiles might do it for their own sexual gratification, but they would also talk to the child and hold his hand - it's not reasonable to infer anything from that.
As for whether he should be on the register - you may well be right that from a legal point of view he could be placed on it, but isn't the intention there to warn people of a potential danger? If so, than only people who can reasonably be thought of as dangerous should be on it.
If it is at night, they probably wouldn't even notice
So the MAC filtering would either make the hacking noticeable (interfering with legit users traffic) or force the attacker to wait. That's not much, but it's inconvenient for the attacker and it costs close to nothing to implement. So why not turn it on?
Because criminals buy their encryption software at Best Buy...
Most criminals are stupid, and law enforcement always has finite resources. For that reason it's important that law enforcement can handle the majority of cases reasonably quickly and without expending too much effort. They are right on that part.
Other than that, though - a general backdoor is obviously a bad idea as it would provide easy access for criminals. Also it's just not good that government becomes that powerful.
[...] found that gadget use was involved in 25% of them.
Which doesn't necessarily mean a lot, if gadget use is widespread. E.g. if 50% of people have AC running in their cars, then you'd have to expect that in 50% of cars involved in a crash the AC would be turned on. Measuring these 50% would only lead to the conclusion that AC use has no impact on car safety.
Well the study states that "Laws banning hand-held cell phone use reduced use by about half when they were first implemented. [...] the laws appear to have had some longterm effect." and "There is no evidence that cell phone or texting bans have reduced crashes."
So the bans have an effect (fewer people use cell phones while driving) but the crash rate is not noticeably reduced as a result. That suggest that there is not much of a connection between cell phone use and car crashes.
"In the wild." As such it's an interesting observation, and a good picture. However as the primatologist in the article stated: this is not tool use but proto-tool use.
As for the diver's comments: "One of the problems with the definition of tool use as it currently stands is it's totally written for primates," he says. "You cannot swing a hammer effectively underwater."
Exactly, that's why tool use underwater would be so interesting. Didn't happen, though.
Aggression in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not one-sided. There is also the settlement policy, the actions to drive Palestinians out of Jerusalem, the economic blockades etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Build a better mouse trap and someone on Slashdot will beat a path to your door ... just to tell you that people used to make mouse traps before and that it's therefore old tech.
The client is supposed to be OSS, so it should be possible to port it.
Well, given that innovation usually means to build new concepts on top of older ideas, or to extent older ideas - innovation means you'll have to defend yourself against other's patents.
Nobody is using actual patent *texts* in order to innovate though:
Regarding "Mutually Assured Destruction" - that can only work if there are two parties. If you have hundreds or thousands of parties involved, it's impossible that they could all be balanced against each other. In this case the patent portfolio prevents newcomers from entering the market, so it's very one-sided. And of course a patent portfolio provides virtually no defense against a company which doesn't produce anything - e.g. a law firm which buys patents.
Well, any piece of equipment can fail, and of course you'd expect lightning to do serious damage. However a single failure shouldn't be sufficient to cause an accident. A train being halted and stop signal being raised - that should count as normal operation, not a failure mode. So if train passes a signal which it shouldn't have, there should be a second system which detects this problem.
The article gives the impression that there was only one such system. That would be a design issue. Typically on European railway systems (definitely on HSR lines, but also on many others) there is a separate system which triggers the train's brakes if a driver misses a signal. At a minimum that system should not be triggered by the same pin which controls the light signal. Furthermore I would expect that for HSR, the train's position is reported automatically and can be observed remotely. Somebody should have monitored the situation, noticed that the train had missed a signal and alerted the driver.
I work in automotive safety, so this is not exactly my field - however normally train systems operate to much higher safety standards then cars. (For obvious reasons: the impact of a single crash event is much higher, and the costs on a per passenger basis are much lower.)
Realistically - with 40 people dead, this is nowhere in the range of the death numbers car travel reaches. However people in China seem mainly concerned about the cover-ups, which apparently included attempts to abandon survivors in the wreckage. That seems like a good focus - the accident should be investigated properly, and the problems should be fixed.
Has anyone else taken a closer look at this though?
Yes, these guys. They just launched a test rocket on June 3rd this year.
Well, if it's really only about fuel but not a general energy shortage, then you could just use hydrogen.
Well Apple isn't really in a monopoly position. You can use e.g. Android products instead. It's legal to leverage your market position as long as you are not a monopoly.
somehow, I assume bad motives. you try to remove all anonymity - but that is BAD for us.
I tried to register a new youtube account - just because I'd like to keep that separate from G+, and was directed to an account confirmation page, asking me to give them my phone number so that they'd send me the confirmation code via SMS. I don't know what they are trying to pull there, but no fucking way.
Anyone who spells "liter" as "litre" is a moron.
Or French.
Sure, I want one: 8m6m68ae8k@snkmail.com (looks weird but works, and I don't care if it gets to the spammers).
Well, the guy sucks as a neighbor, he should definitely be punished. However they investigated him thoroughly, and he is clearly bad at covering his tracks - I think by now we can take it for granted that he is not actually a pedophile. (They would have found out, otherwise.) Also I think it's possible that he could be reformed or at least deterred. Whereas if someone has a sexual desire for children he can not really change that, just as I can't really change my sexual preference for women.
It also solely references people's own perceptions - e.g. it doesn't check whether night shift workers actually are more often overweight than their colleagues in the day shift, just that they believe that to be the case. It would be more interesting to have actual weight data. Also there is the issue of causality - for example it's conceivable that someone who has fewer social contacts would be more likely to accept a job on the night shift.
Of course it's very reasonable to assume that night shifts would (on average) impact people negatively - I guess most of us would expect that to hold true. It would be interesting to prove it, though - unfortunately the methodology chosen is unsuitable for that.
Seems spot on, really. Banks add bogus charges on debit accounts, as well.
Pedo in my books...
Shouldn't word have meaning though? Pedophile = someone who is sexually attracted to prepubescent children. There is nothing in that particular case of downloading which would indicate that he did it because he was sexually interested, and merely kissing a little child is in no way indicative of pedophilia. Sure pedophiles might do it for their own sexual gratification, but they would also talk to the child and hold his hand - it's not reasonable to infer anything from that.
As for whether he should be on the register - you may well be right that from a legal point of view he could be placed on it, but isn't the intention there to warn people of a potential danger? If so, than only people who can reasonably be thought of as dangerous should be on it.
you have to have another computer already on the network handy
That's a fair point, but for some of us not having a computer on the network would be a rather unusual event.
If it is at night, they probably wouldn't even notice
So the MAC filtering would either make the hacking noticeable (interfering with legit users traffic) or force the attacker to wait. That's not much, but it's inconvenient for the attacker and it costs close to nothing to implement. So why not turn it on?
It's useless information except to scientists.
So let's see what kind of website are we on, here? Does "News for nerds" ring a bell?
No, no - the scenario I was responding to was after the laptop has been given back. At this point it is no longer evidence. Just check GP for context.
Because criminals buy their encryption software at Best Buy...
Most criminals are stupid, and law enforcement always has finite resources. For that reason it's important that law enforcement can handle the majority of cases reasonably quickly and without expending too much effort. They are right on that part.
Other than that, though - a general backdoor is obviously a bad idea as it would provide easy access for criminals. Also it's just not good that government becomes that powerful.
"I forgot the password so I reformatted it."
[...] found that gadget use was involved in 25% of them.
Which doesn't necessarily mean a lot, if gadget use is widespread. E.g. if 50% of people have AC running in their cars, then you'd have to expect that in 50% of cars involved in a crash the AC would be turned on. Measuring these 50% would only lead to the conclusion that AC use has no impact on car safety.
Well the study states that "Laws banning hand-held cell phone use reduced use by about half when they were first implemented. [...] the laws appear to have had some longterm effect." and "There is no evidence that cell phone or texting bans have reduced crashes."
So the bans have an effect (fewer people use cell phones while driving) but the crash rate is not noticeably reduced as a result. That suggest that there is not much of a connection between cell phone use and car crashes.
Where's The Punchline?
"In the wild." As such it's an interesting observation, and a good picture. However as the primatologist in the article stated: this is not tool use but proto-tool use.
As for the diver's comments: "One of the problems with the definition of tool use as it currently stands is it's totally written for primates," he says. "You cannot swing a hammer effectively underwater."
Exactly, that's why tool use underwater would be so interesting. Didn't happen, though.
There AREN'T any
I found this DVI to HDMI cable. Is that suitable?
Aggression in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is not one-sided. There is also the settlement policy, the actions to drive Palestinians out of Jerusalem, the economic blockades etc.