> Kennedy doesn't have to be a "qualified researcher" in order to publish something in Salon.com, even something with scientific content. Salon.com is not a scientific journal, it's an on-line magazine for journals and writers, and Kennedy qualifies as one of those.
Strictly speaking he doesn't have to be a "qualified researcher" in order to publish in a scientific journal either, so long as he does his homework, justifies his method of collecting data, and draws his conclusions by applying sound reasoning to the data.
When I want to read about science, I pick up a science book. When I want to read a story, I pick up science fiction... or heroic fantasy, or horror, or thriller, or whatever else I think will tickle my literary yearnings.
What makes a book "good" because it has somebody's notion of Real Science (tm) in it?
The only thought these people provoke is curiosity as to whether they're driven by snobbery or anal retentivity.
> okay, so it might have been fantastic the first time around, but it has got to be one of the most overrated series ever.
With possible competition from The Matrix and the LotR books.
> even if nothing was done after the first three films so it was as "pure" as possible, imo once the people old enough to have seen it on release die it would have been completely forgotten.
IMO eIV wasn't great, but at least it was fun. Somewhere along the way Lucas lost his way, first by trying to take it too seriously, then by trying to make it a big-screen babysitter.
> after ROTS [...] I tried watching the first film again. I got about 10 mins in before I got so bored I had to stop - "stop dicking about in the desert and get to the point!".
I said this during the last SW story, but I'll say it again due to context: IIRC, the original edit was much slower paced than the versions now available are. I remember renting them just before the revisions came out, and being distracted by the long pauses between exchanges of dialog, as if the actors were filmed speaking their parts separately and then spliced together without enough scissoring in between.
OTOH, the WB's broadcast channel showed Clash of the Titans today, and I was astonished to discover that it came out in 1981. I always thought it was just some campy leftover 60's crap. We may err in judging eIV by modern expectations of how a movie should be made.
> So if you're looking for an artistic rather than fiscal reason, that's it: George Lucas gets to make the movies he wants to make. He's writing and directing them, despite pleas from the fans to let somebody else do it. Supposedly that's what a real artist does: make the art his way, and critics, fans, and profits be damned.
And Lucas just happens to think action figures are an art form.
> I wonder if I'm one of the people worrying them. I have cookies off by default, and only turn them on for sites that really need them by whitelisting. Those that I don't want to use a cookie for but have to, I allow to set one but only for the session.
I don't even do that. With rare exceptions, if a site will not render without a cookie, I just close the tab and visit one of the billion other web pages on offer.
(I say this in hope that marketing types will be reading it.)
> Is there a form somewhere that I can enter my credit card information to check if my cc number has been comprimised?:p
I see that you:p'd it, but one of my first thoughts was that someone could probably set up a phishing page for "enter your card number, name, and social security number (for verification purposes only, of course), and our database will tell you whether your card number was harvested".
Probably a gold mine for identity theft resources.
Also, lots of people give their bank account's routing number for automagic deposit of their refund. Maybe there's a way to forge that kind of transaction and clean out people's bank accounts?
> Apparently the breach was detected by the company handling the cards (CardSystems Solutions, Inc.) on May 22
One source I read said it was detected by the credit card companies when they noticed an upturn in the number of fraudulent transactions being reported to them by banks, and only then traced back to the clearinghouse.
> VISA spokespeople claim that they did not announce it sooner because there was an ongoing FBI investigation.
Yeah, supposedly there was an agreement to silence (for good reasons or bad), and the other participants are surprised (and probably outraged) that M/C broke the news.
And while the "FBI investigating" story is at least a semi-plausible reason for silence, I suspect the real motivation was "OMFG, let's stall as long as we can and hope Jesus comes back before word gets out". As mentioned in other threads, there are estimates that it will cost a billion dollars to replace all those cards.
Also, IIRC, in the past these exposures have always turned out to be much larger than first reported.
> how anyone can possibly get so much information by hacking somewhere?
The company is (was?) a clearinghouse for handling charges by the four major credit-card companies, and someone had a program listening in on the transactions for some unknown amount of time.
> I read in the MSNBC article that it costs $10.00 per card to do that, which means this particular incident would cost the credit card companies about $400,000,000.00 to reissue cards. That is a ton of money!
One story I read on this said that it would cost banks a billion dollars to replace the cards, which is why people weren't being sent new cards already. (They've known about this for several weeks now.)
To ensure that no one places any fraudulent charges on our credit cards, let's all run out to our favorite toy stores and run up our cards to their limits.
> But that leaves a little under 3/4 who aren't mastercard branded. If it was a typical third-party payments system then it is likely that they handled other types of credit cards, just that those companies havent commented yet. So when is the other shoe going to fall?
The news has been reporting for the last 14 hours (at least) that the four major credit cards are all affected.
Also, this has been known since May 22, but everyone was keeping it quiet.
If there's another shoe, it's going to be that the breach was even larger than reported, or that they got more information than we're being told.
So, we're going to build a base on the moon with non-existent transport, when we can't even finish the ISS with transport we actually have?
The moon base will never happen. The trip to Mars as currently conceived won't ever happen. All we've got now is a faith-based space program to go along with our faith-based anti-missile defense, our faith-based homeland security plan, and our faith-based social security plan. Our national decision makers are completely out of touch with reality.
> Nope, not "strictly speaking". We can never "prove" anything in science.
So, are you saying that you've never heard or read a scientist use the word "prove"?
I agree 100% that we can't formally prove anything in the empirical sciences, because proofs require axioms or previously proven theorems. But you're merely exercising a degree of anal-retentivity that isn't actually dominant among scientists.
> The theory of which you refer to is only applicable to using stable wormholes for time travel.
No, unless I remember wrong it is a general result that does not depend on the mechanism.
I'm having trouble framing a google search that turns up relevant articles, though the last sentence on this page makes passing mention of it.
> Never use the word "proven" around scientists. They'll kick your butt for it.
Yes, strictly speaking we only "prove" stuff in formal systems. However, we often use the word even in the empirical sciences. It goes without saying that if our understanding of spacetime is wrong, the "proof" fails as well.
> Couldn't you go back in time to kill your grandfather, only to have him rematerialize out of quantum randomness 5 minutes later? It's not impossible, just really improbable... maybe that's the protection mechanism.
The actual protection mechanism is that you discover your grandfather to still be a young stud rather than a cranky old man, and he gives you a good ass-beating before sending you back where you belong.
> It tries to use the fact that we observe no disappearing people, or other strange temporal modifications as an argument that such things don't happen, and are thus impossible.
IIRC it has been proven that no time machine could take you back before the time when the machine was created, so unless someone has already created on and kept it secret we shouldn't be seeing tamper effects or visitors from the future anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
> Kennedy doesn't have to be a "qualified researcher" in order to publish something in Salon.com, even something with scientific content. Salon.com is not a scientific journal, it's an on-line magazine for journals and writers, and Kennedy qualifies as one of those.
Strictly speaking he doesn't have to be a "qualified researcher" in order to publish in a scientific journal either, so long as he does his homework, justifies his method of collecting data, and draws his conclusions by applying sound reasoning to the data.
> And I don't see how they can't be held liable if a link isn't found.
Could you rephrase that with a few less n'ts?
When I want to read about science, I pick up a science book. When I want to read a story, I pick up science fiction... or heroic fantasy, or horror, or thriller, or whatever else I think will tickle my literary yearnings.
What makes a book "good" because it has somebody's notion of Real Science (tm) in it?
The only thought these people provoke is curiosity as to whether they're driven by snobbery or anal retentivity.
> A lot of you won't like to hear it... But isn't google trying to get a monopoly on everything that is on our planet?
They may turn out to be the Microsoft of the internet era. However, so far they haven't shown signs of being a great evil, and their stuff isn't crap.
> I thought that episode IV kind of established that Luke's life up to that point had been really boring...
Now that is a story line that Lucas is qualified to do right.
> okay, so it might have been fantastic the first time around, but it has got to be one of the most overrated series ever.
With possible competition from The Matrix and the LotR books.
> even if nothing was done after the first three films so it was as "pure" as possible, imo once the people old enough to have seen it on release die it would have been completely forgotten.
IMO eIV wasn't great, but at least it was fun. Somewhere along the way Lucas lost his way, first by trying to take it too seriously, then by trying to make it a big-screen babysitter.
> after ROTS [...] I tried watching the first film again. I got about 10 mins in before I got so bored I had to stop - "stop dicking about in the desert and get to the point!".
I said this during the last SW story, but I'll say it again due to context: IIRC, the original edit was much slower paced than the versions now available are. I remember renting them just before the revisions came out, and being distracted by the long pauses between exchanges of dialog, as if the actors were filmed speaking their parts separately and then spliced together without enough scissoring in between.
OTOH, the WB's broadcast channel showed Clash of the Titans today, and I was astonished to discover that it came out in 1981. I always thought it was just some campy leftover 60's crap. We may err in judging eIV by modern expectations of how a movie should be made.
It seems that Star Trek isn't the only over-exploited franchise that needs to take a rest for a decade or two.
> So if you're looking for an artistic rather than fiscal reason, that's it: George Lucas gets to make the movies he wants to make. He's writing and directing them, despite pleas from the fans to let somebody else do it. Supposedly that's what a real artist does: make the art his way, and critics, fans, and profits be damned.
And Lucas just happens to think action figures are an art form.
> I wonder if I'm one of the people worrying them. I have cookies off by default, and only turn them on for sites that really need them by whitelisting. Those that I don't want to use a cookie for but have to, I allow to set one but only for the session.
I don't even do that. With rare exceptions, if a site will not render without a cookie, I just close the tab and visit one of the billion other web pages on offer.
(I say this in hope that marketing types will be reading it.)
> Einstein's brain fell in the range of normal for all measurements, except for the portion known as the inferior parietal lobes
His inferior lobes were superior?
> Is there a form somewhere that I can enter my credit card information to check if my cc number has been comprimised?
I see that you
> Why would crackers want to hack the IRS?
Probably a gold mine for identity theft resources.
Also, lots of people give their bank account's routing number for automagic deposit of their refund. Maybe there's a way to forge that kind of transaction and clean out people's bank accounts?
> Check out their careers page.
I wonder how many of those open positions have opened up since May 22.
If I worked there I'd certainly be looking for a lifeboat.
> Apparently the breach was detected by the company handling the cards (CardSystems Solutions, Inc.) on May 22
One source I read said it was detected by the credit card companies when they noticed an upturn in the number of fraudulent transactions being reported to them by banks, and only then traced back to the clearinghouse.
> VISA spokespeople claim that they did not announce it sooner because there was an ongoing FBI investigation.
Yeah, supposedly there was an agreement to silence (for good reasons or bad), and the other participants are surprised (and probably outraged) that M/C broke the news.
And while the "FBI investigating" story is at least a semi-plausible reason for silence, I suspect the real motivation was "OMFG, let's stall as long as we can and hope Jesus comes back before word gets out". As mentioned in other threads, there are estimates that it will cost a billion dollars to replace all those cards.
Also, IIRC, in the past these exposures have always turned out to be much larger than first reported.
> how anyone can possibly get so much information by hacking somewhere?
The company is (was?) a clearinghouse for handling charges by the four major credit-card companies, and someone had a program listening in on the transactions for some unknown amount of time.
> I read in the MSNBC article that it costs $10.00 per card to do that, which means this particular incident would cost the credit card companies about $400,000,000.00 to reissue cards. That is a ton of money!
One story I read on this said that it would cost banks a billion dollars to replace the cards, which is why people weren't being sent new cards already. (They've known about this for several weeks now.)
To ensure that no one places any fraudulent charges on our credit cards, let's all run out to our favorite toy stores and run up our cards to their limits.
> But that leaves a little under 3/4 who aren't mastercard branded. If it was a typical third-party payments system then it is likely that they handled other types of credit cards, just that those companies havent commented yet. So when is the other shoe going to fall?
The news has been reporting for the last 14 hours (at least) that the four major credit cards are all affected.
Also, this has been known since May 22, but everyone was keeping it quiet.
If there's another shoe, it's going to be that the breach was even larger than reported, or that they got more information than we're being told.
So, we're going to build a base on the moon with non-existent transport, when we can't even finish the ISS with transport we actually have?
The moon base will never happen. The trip to Mars as currently conceived won't ever happen. All we've got now is a faith-based space program to go along with our faith-based anti-missile defense, our faith-based homeland security plan, and our faith-based social security plan. Our national decision makers are completely out of touch with reality.
for jokes on Slashdot?
> Nope, not "strictly speaking". We can never "prove" anything in science.
So, are you saying that you've never heard or read a scientist use the word "prove"?
I agree 100% that we can't formally prove anything in the empirical sciences, because proofs require axioms or previously proven theorems. But you're merely exercising a degree of anal-retentivity that isn't actually dominant among scientists.
> Slashdot was created in 1997, which means that "first post" meme is 8 years old.
Actually, the fp meme wasn't original equipment. IIRC it's slightly more recent than the portman/petrified/grits silliness.
> The theory of which you refer to is only applicable to using stable wormholes for time travel.
No, unless I remember wrong it is a general result that does not depend on the mechanism.
I'm having trouble framing a google search that turns up relevant articles, though the last sentence on this page makes passing mention of it.
> Never use the word "proven" around scientists. They'll kick your butt for it.
Yes, strictly speaking we only "prove" stuff in formal systems. However, we often use the word even in the empirical sciences. It goes without saying that if our understanding of spacetime is wrong, the "proof" fails as well.
> Couldn't you go back in time to kill your grandfather, only to have him rematerialize out of quantum randomness 5 minutes later? It's not impossible, just really improbable... maybe that's the protection mechanism.
The actual protection mechanism is that you discover your grandfather to still be a young stud rather than a cranky old man, and he gives you a good ass-beating before sending you back where you belong.
> It tries to use the fact that we observe no disappearing people, or other strange temporal modifications as an argument that such things don't happen, and are thus impossible.
IIRC it has been proven that no time machine could take you back before the time when the machine was created, so unless someone has already created on and kept it secret we shouldn't be seeing tamper effects or visitors from the future anyway.