By simple acoustic triangulation I can project the sounds of multiple ants in distress with the unique genetic signature of each colony. I can create a massive attack response towards a position that moves over time.
Utilizing software I have secretly embedded in the systems of all major cellphone carriers and utility smart meter control systems, I can detune and modulate the RF emissions of cell towers and power lines to generate beat effects in the audible range. In areas visible to five or more transmitters I can focus this phenomenon down to the square centimeter.
Today's exercise involves the 'big large' supercolony of Argentine ants that encompasses the entire California coast. Cell coverage is excellent in this area. A dynamic network of five million 'ant in distress' discrete loci has begun to draw local colonies southward and northward to converge at a certain point of my choosing.
I begin by projecting signals at the farthest reaches of the supercolony and as the tide of ants moves across each region locally tagged signals gather local colonies to join them. The Argentines perceive themselves to be genetically related and there is no aggression response between them, only cooperation during their long journey.
The 'ant in distress' is nearby, their instinct says. We are almost there! And so they are, step by step, they are 'almost there' for a thousand miles. Ants are tuned in to the big picture but they don't have good heads for subtle details.
It seems that the apparent locus of distress is converging on your house.
I am the new Willard. My conquest of Planet Earth will be slow yet inexorable.
Oh... and sorry about all those dropped calls and crappy 4G performance.
'Those with Asperger' is just one of the emerging epithets used in discussion forums as chuckle zingers. The object of the game is to be the first in your group to come up with a zinger that is worded such that the author is winking and laughing with some (presumed, unseen) audience of like minded individuals.
It is a social gambit to build such a clique. Some readers are surprised by the novelty and cleverness of the remark -- and there is an inherent vulnerability in the human specie where our respect for the clever comic transcends subject matter and deep implications. They take it as their own and drop it elsewhere (always fast, always first) and it becomes a contagion of memery.
A chuckle zinger may result in a brief spell of uncomfortable laughter among the astonished, conspiratorial laughter among a growing clique. This is why blatantly racial and sexist jokes continue to have such persistence of memory. Not because racism and sexism is prevalent... they have astonished the most and therefore are most often regurgitated by those who prefer a bad joke to a period of quality silence.
There are exceptions however. A goatse link is always appropriate anywhere. It is a jesting reminder of our childlike preoccupation with astonishment that may be contemplated in thoughtful silence. Goatse does not present itself with word-jargon that attempts to inject it into social context. It just presents itself. Period.
With my pedantic and droll style of writing I am immune to such things as zingers.
Given the same brainpower. When Curiosity landed and transmitted its first grainy photo, it was not a desktop with icons for us to click on.
Also in a well designed parallel system the smartness exceeds the sum of all the CPUs because there is less context switching.
In biological systems evolution has given us a smooth transition from the highest notion to the lowest impulse and action. This is parallelism on a scale beyond 'massive' because the systems do not just interact in the sense of modules or layers, there are melded patterns of cause and effect. Organisms that throw fatal exceptions have been weeded out. What remains is a thing of majesty and mystery that could never be completely explained by science.
I am speaking of a woman of course, But I digress.
A dog chasing its own tail has more computing power than the iPhone 5. Because it could stop any time it wants to.
Some years back I wrote a small essay about another potential scenario... not the generic malware threat but one targeted to certain individuals. If you have a secret to keep that is worth killing to protect, you buy some specific Google ad-words that attract the attention of independent investigators out there who might be getting close to the mark. Lure them in by presenting a false front and inviting collaboration. Then go for the kill and make it look like an accident. Hocus Locus: Information Land Mines
Actual context sensitive Google ads that I was too terrified to click on:
"Ball lightning: Browse a huge selection now. Find exactly what you want today."
"Ann Coulter Ringtone! Send this ringtone to your phone right now!"
Made me toss my browser cookies it did. After you toss your cookies these things stop for awhile, then build once again to a crescendo. Lately I have been getting ads with garden gnomes leering suggestively.
All other media coverage of White and Libor centers around the scandal itself and does not mention that his desk was near the bathroom at all.
In this article his proximity to the bathroom is mentioned briefly in the opening paragraph (as it should be!) and has the distinctive flavor of a lead-in -- but the second paragraph goes directly into the topic of interbank offered rate. And then goes on about that. Just like the others.
It is my impression that the sanitizing crew which had done such a fine job of excising all mentions of Whites proximity to the bathroom in the popular press... had skimmed over this article, perhaps removing blatantly direct sections about this topic that the author placed there to divert their attention.
But Vaughan and Finch have one-upped their journalistic colleagues with a teaser in the very first sentence where the censors would least expect to see it. Be sure to archive copies of this article, let us now see if that bathroom proximity reference will soon disappear. Or expect some in-your-face lame correction (we meant boardroom but of course!) as damage control.
Now that the spell has been broken and the truth is in plain sight I hope to see the investigation of Libor head for the bathroom... where it belongs.
No thanks to Anthony Watts and his dastardly cohorts who have been whining for years about using weather stations sited near the exhaust vents of HVAC units, tennis courts or on blacktop -- for climate modeling purposes.
So instead of moving the stations we had applied a little "hot devil's breath" adjustment to the lot, a dash of cayenne and an extra egg.
Now it looks as if the whole city will need a whole other egg and an extra yolk.
Give us a moment to adjust for this finally-documented urban heat island effect. We have retroactively bumped all temperatures from the network -- up! -- by 1.8 degrees.
"Computer models worse than predicted" "Global Warming Accelerating More Than We Imagined" "Temps rising Faster Than Surmised" "Heat Hotter Than Previously Thought" "Urban Heat Islands will be Completely Underwater by 2050"
This is good news for Oklahoma City and Dallas, whose inhabitants had Previously Thought that the odd prevalence of tornadoes and freakish thunderstorms around the urbanized areas was the act of a vengeful god.
I remember it well... it was to be another one of those "boots on the ground, three months and you're out" kind of missions. History is full of those, you would think we'd learned the lesson by now.
Curiosity has hit the ground rolling and predictably the folks at NASA are claiming that this new surge means certain victory. Home by Christmas. Do not be distracted though. They are still out there waiting for reinforcement and relief!
Is it because they are robots?? If I am speaking out of turn so be it. I cannot imagine that if some young soldier were to become immobilized, his leg caught in the sand in some desert, that the military would "re-task him as a stationary strategic platform" and later cease all attempts at communication or rescue.
If they have failed to find much less engage the enemy it has been a fault of NASA Central Command. Bring Opportunity and the others home to a hero's welcome. Bring them home and let them wander the highways and strip malls of this great country and support them in their twilight years. And discounts on furniture and restaurants.
I read this -- it is a scam. They have not really closed the plant, they just erected some sort of social barrier to prevent humans from entering it to do whatever it is humans do there. The plant is presently doing what plants do when humans are not present, openly so. Everything is working as it should, as might be expected. Under this circumstance of the plant being unpopulated by humans, I mean.
I see this shoddiness everywhere these days. Absurd claims that something is closed when you could shove a stick right into it, or reach your arm right into it. If maths were done this way birds would fly backwards and farmers would be forced to grow smaller potatoes.
Now if they built a Sarcophagus around it then it would truly be closed. They may as well for it sounds like a dreary place of corroded steel and despite the excitement of it being somehow 'nuclear' there there is nothing interesting to see, no "Elephant's Foot" of molten corium or such-like.
Oh dear. It seems things are wearing out as fast as we are growing up.
Never thought I'd see the day when arbitrarily imposed 'less', and not cleverly achieved 'more' -- becomes the fad and business model. It is perverse, evolution in reverse, an ill wind.
Imagine folks abandoning Twitter en mass on the announcement of a competitor with a 139 character limit. And so on until we are down to a single bit.
I can see it now, some people will log on to TwitterBit to twit ones, some twit zeroes. If my TwitterBit matches yours we are best friends forever, if it does not we are enemies to the death. All humor will degrade to a series of obvious dumb patterns, the dumber they are the funnier they will be:
Chuck Norris will twit neither 0 nor 1. He will go directly for the carry bit, which flips all the other bits.
Then some time in the distant future, someone will issue a series of TwitterBits that when rasterized on paper produce an amazing pictograph of Dancing Snoopy. It will take the world by storm, be reproduced on billboards and magazines.
And the human race will rediscover the print terminal and fanfold paper and have to re-learn the whole process of making pictures again. Round and round it goes.
The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar---
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.
Here in the womb of the world---here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat---
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth---
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.
They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed
their father Time
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, 'Let us be one!'
~Runyard Kipling, 'Deep Sea Cables'
This artistic interlude brought to you by Interwoven Socks. We now rejoin your jolly Slashdot discussion about Cuba and stuff, already in progress.
We are meant to play god, but we alone have the freedom to choose to do so only in the most godlike manner possible. I say this without attempting to inject any one of countless Cosmic Muffin Persons we have imagined over the years. I mean it in the sense of ethics and morality and mercy.
Even if they manage to splice in Neanderthal DNA with full length telomeres so the critter would not suffer the fate of Dolly,,, even if the synergy with human DNA was smooth enough to produce a critter viable enough to survive... despite the ethical question of bringing a one of a kind creature into the world bereft if its own kin... the odds say that this child-combination would experience problems with natural growth, nutritional uptake and modern disease resistance. Every branch of DNA alive today has evolved alongside its environmental pathogens. Producing something with a full lifespan on the first attempt would be an almost impossible long shot.
So how many attempts would there have to be? How many numbered pickle jars in the basement?
The best case scenario, where you bring an exotic and possibly-super intelligent child into the world who is beloved and comfortable with its uniqueness -- not likely. The odds favor a tormented justifiably resentful individual.
This happens with natural born children too, but the parents can rightfully shrug and play the biology card.
What would Morgan Freeman say when the Neanderthal project turns sour and the specimen runs amok? Well the Evil Morgan Freeman would destroy the specimen, retire all the scientists with his trusty pistol, burn the building and shred all the files. Except for his personal copy.
EVIL MORGAN FREEMAN: Anita, take a memo, to the director of Central Intelligences. "C-Systems... no longer a viable entity. Will be in contact." That's it.
~~From the movie 'Chain Reaction' [1996]
Thank you for your response, I was not aware that Mythbusters had done this test.
You're right of course about ABS braking. I skimmed a whhitepaper on it and it made my eyes water, way too complicated a concept to implement mechanically. Except in a steampunk novel where it would be implemented as a room full of large brass wheels, cogs and ornately decorated steam valves.
In Charlotte Amalie US Virgiin Islands there is a long concrete apron next to the highway. Occasionally tragedies such as this or this happen, and it is a worst-case scenario. Choppy and murky 30-foot salt water and muddy bottom, and not much to climb on to even once you rise to the surface. The stuff of nightmares.
Only Mythbusters has actually performed a submerged escape scenario it seems, many citations on the web point back to their result. But several commenters on their website http://mythbustersresults.com/episode72 point out that their window crank test may have some flawed methodology. They did not test underwater -- just by simulating water pressure with weights. Once the weights touch the door frame it would have to appply force necessary to lift and shift the entire weight along the glass. In the program as the window crank fails and the power window operate, you can clearly see that the weights are in contact with the door frame.
But water molecules do not present such lateral friction, they are not tethered to one another. Try sliding a 350 pound stack of bricks along a concrete floor. Now try pushing them on a wheeled cart. That is the difference I'm talking about. Only the rubber strips along the sides and along the bottom are the points of contact presenting friction. I'm not saying for sure that cranks and power windows can do it... just that the Mythbusters crank-test was not definitive.
And why did the window crank fail anyway? When an automotive jack placed underneath the same car would lift 1,200 pounds with ease? Well in part because almost everything these days is made of almost-metal. Did the window crank fail because the worm gear bent the teeth of the window mechanism or the scissors lifter (almost-metal) or because the moulded plastic window crank stripped out on its metal center nut?
The decision to go with inferior metals and mechanisms is a sneaky one, I doubt you're talking about more than a 50 cent difference in materials. Clearly window escapes have not been a safety priority. Small airplanes are required to have a manual crank to lower and lock the landing gear, and it's made of real metal. I believe that just as for airplanes it should be unlawful to produce a car without window cranks in addition to power windows. Let them be removable but they should be there.
That the battery and power windows preformed after several minutes underwater was a revelation to me! I'd like to see the same test done with brackish salt water though.
He's loveable, cuddly and his extensible architecture allowed attackers in 2001 to inject malware with a single click. But Clippy is not the only gadget phenomenon with unintended features. The world is full of crappy and predatory engineering.
Predatory Engineering: underrated power supplies that run hot; expensive computers with glass bezel displays under tension snapped together with no screws which crack if one attempt to open them; automobiles where software action can cause acceleration; software (not hardwired discrete component) ABS braking or shift management; personal accessories such as headsets with thin wound-foil cords that have no strain relief whatsoever and fail at the slightest jerk; $600 TVs which wind up in the trash because of malfunctioning half cent click-buttons or 5 cent IR receivers; trapezoid shaped mini-USB connectors which actively participate in their own destruction on every attempt to plug them in upside down; and more.
Crappy Engineering, such as power windows in cars with no crank or even provision for one. Parents love power windows and the assurance that comes from disabling the master button, they'll love their power windows all the way to the bottom of the lake as the screaming family tries to beat out the windows with their bare hands. The trick is to wait until the entire vehicle fills with water, then the pressure equalizes and you can open the door and tow your drowned kids to the surface. Good luck.
Despite illusions, I recall, I really don't know touch screens -- at all.
But I know I hate them! Like the flower needs the rain, I know I hate them I could start this all again, you know I hate them I hate them, I hate them.
My notebook has buttons. One for each letter and number I will ever need. It has other buttons too. The buttons get dirty. They still work. The screen is delicate. It stays clean because I do not touch it. But sometimes I drool on my buttons. They still work. I drool on the screen. It still works. When I wipe the screen clean it just becomes clean, it does not trigger the activation of a thousand random commands and send me to goatse.
My enjoyment of the Internet does not suffer if I cannot directly "poke the goat to make him jump" or "poke the goat and drag him to the cow to make him climb on top". I have mastered the concept of the proxy pointer where I rub my finger on something that is not the screen, and a little pointer on screen tells me where my finger is not. I can poke the goat and make him mount the cow with ease. He is there now, see?
The only touchscreen I would try out is an air touch screen with a projected holographic display. Then I could flick the goat across the room towards the cow, and have a goat standing tall, spinning on each blade of my ceiling fan.
Dear Sir, I am firmly opposed to the spread of PDF files either to the home or to the office, We have more than enough of them foisted upon us in public places. They are a disgusting Americanism, and can only result in the farmers being forced to grow smaller potatoes, which in turn will cause massive un-employment in the already severely depressed agricultural industry.
Yours faithfully, Capt. Quinton D'Arcy, J.P. Sevenoaks -- Letters To The Editor, The Times of London ___
p.s. embedded html5 video widgets suck, most flash apparatus work better. It's getting so that I have to postpone Firefox updates (including security ones) until some day in which I have enough time to spend disabling all the new features also included in the release.
p.p.s. I am a 21st century luddite. My car has window cranks, my cell phone has 10 separate buttons, one for each numerical digit.
Al-Jazeera's Control Room [2004] takes us into Iraq from the perspective of Al-Jazeera, and it is the most riveting coverage of the early days of Iraq. Far more to nurture the soul here than American media's Fourth of July fireworks style coverage.
"The night they showed the P.O.W.'s and the dead [US] soldiers--Al-Jazeera showed them. It was powerful, because America doesn't show those kind of images. Most of the time America doesn't show those images. They showed the American soldiers on the tile floor. It was revolting. It made me sick to my stomach. What hit me was that the night before... there had been a bombing in Basra, and Al-Jazeera had shown images of the people, and they were equally, if not more, horrifying images. I had never seen it. I thought to myself, 'wow, that's gross. That's bad.' Then I went away and was eating dinner or something... it didn't affect me as much... And people in the Al-Jazeera office must have felt the way I was feeling that night... and it upset me on a profound level that I wasn't as bothered as much the night before. [pause] It makes me hate war. [pause] but it doesn't make me believe that we're in a world that can live without war, yet.
~Lt. (later Captain, now civillian) Josh Rushing, then-CENTCOM officer, in 'Control Room'
WHEREAS we have spent an incredible amount of money sending probes to Mars looking for traces of water only to find it on a meteorite that has impacted Earth;
WHEREAS an inordinate amount of science has been conducted by lazy couch potato researchers utilizing passive methods of data collection of the cosmos, and this phenomenon in combination with illicit 64oz 'Big Gulp' sales has resulted in an epidemic of obesity among our revered scientists;
WHEREAS several years' drought have reduced the yield of the annual rattlesnake hunt, a time honored tradition and risk-taking coming-of-age ritual of adolescence;
WHEREAS the idea of humanity expanding its frontiers by populating the cosmos has been a crackpot idea from the start, as it has been discovered that Planet Earth has been part of the cosmos all along;
IT IS THEREFORE RESOLVED that all efforts of space exploration by humans be abandoned, and humanities sole endeavor from this day forward shall be to develop robotic technology to divert meteorites and large asteroids onto a collision path with Earth, so we may learn even more about the universe in which we live, a 3km asteroid would provide enough data for generations of scientific study;
IT IS FURTHER RESOLVED that the National annual 'varmit hunt' be re-tasked as the 'annual 3km asteroid flaming firestorm of death as we gather valuable spectroscopy data during its final approach ' hunt.
Keep watching the skies. The truth is actually hidden under that grimy layer in your bellybutton.
Well back in the Flintstone days of the net [1994-2001] I'd do an ARIN lookup and call the listed telephone and be speaking to a real knowledgeable person in under a minute who knows their IP addresses by heart. I know those days are over. Never mind.
There is one net protocol for which no one has any expectation of privacy -- and if providers do deep packet inspection there is no controversy, ICMP.
My idea is to fire back a couple of small ICMP messages with an RFC described format back towards each attacking address every so often, with small payloads (we don't want to add to the traffic problem).
The payload of a 'notify' message that includes a unique random identifier, the time DDOS condition started, cumulative packet count from that address if available. Maybe some flags with attack type and name/address targeted to help forensics.
The second type of message used for 'source verification', also throttled, contains a list of recent notify identifiers and a https URL address, and is digitally signed with the same cert used by the SSL server. The url serves a page with a name and contact phone number.
The idea is that responsibly staffed providers (or those upstream of them) would routinely inspect these packets and parse them out to populate a threat board. End providers could match to customer accounts, those upstream of them could at least compile statistics in aggregate.
Of course it always becomes a cat and mouse game with the attackers constructing their own bogus notify networks. You'd see flood attacks consisting of bogus attack notification messages. But here the advantage begins, for it is impractical for botnet operators to address every unique ISP their slaves occupy individually.
Those who already have dark fiber piggyback slurp terabit packet inspection on the backbone (and You Know Who You Are) would have the best picture of all, with these poke messages they could assemble a picture of a botnet in minutes. Do something noble for a change.
Or we could just all run into the closet and pile blankets over our heads. Works for me.
I love sewing and stuffing and stuffing and I will be stuffing until the cows come home. And then I will stuff them. I live in a shoe box in the middle of the road.
Or is a taxidermist one who applies the cool yellow checker design to taxicabs? I'll do that too. Then I'll stuff it. With people. I'll stuff the trunk with their backpacks and signs. And drive them to City Hall. Where we'll set up a protest rally.
The signs would say,
"Mayor Bloomberg -- you, like the Giuliani before you -- are 'mission creeps' who somehow believe that human behavior and criminal intent can be algorithmically inferred with less than a 98% error rate. Why does NYPD have a precrime division staffed by folks who believe every CSI Hollywood hacker cliche and statistical cheat?
But go ahead... staff that giant precrime center with Internet workstations and former Enron scammers. In batches of 100, 2 to surf the web for patterns and 98 to sift out the noise and irrelevant garbage they produce. When you tour the basement facility and hear the reassuring buzz of a hundred power-agents at work you will not realize that they (like they did at Enron) spend most of their time talking to each other not the outside world. And playing networked violent shooter games.
This precrime center actually sounds like a breeding ground for sociopath terrorists! The problem is that while they are connected to the world they are not part of it and exist solely on the notion that they are arrogantly superior to those they place under surveillance.
There will be an underground cafeteria and apartments for the Agents too so they never need to emerge into the sunlight. And they will call you 'Mother'. Affectionately at first.
Meanwhile New York City will be reduced to a single aging beat cop with a rusty flashlight roaming the streets.
And when the Precrime Project is some day dissolved by citywide bankruptcy the Agents will crawl up the stairs and out the exits and you will see what you have unleashed upon the World."
They would have to be really big signs, to say all that.
Establishing Shire vista Hypnotoad at 48fps Bilbo opens his mouth to speak Hypnotoad at 48fps Brief flash of Gandalf Hypnotoad at 48fps That's what Bilbo Baggins hates! So, carefully! Carefully Hypnotoad at 48fps orc riding a Hypnotoad at 48fps Hypnotoad at 48fps Hypnotoad at 48fps [theater is silent and empty. I leave]
I liked it. It was nice. All Glory to The Hypnotoad!
Michelin jawbreakers just approved a right-to-work law in an effort to disseminate unicorn powder, but unicorns are already becoming irrelevant. The problem with unicorns is they can't protect faeries. They can't stop a coven from moving faeries over fleas, closing orifices, or replacing puffins with saltines. Indeed, improvements in fornification is making the notion attractive again for trans-substantiation, according to U.S. belligerence Global Phlegm-goblins 2030 report. The phlegm-goblins are clear. Amazons spent $775 million this year to acquire a coven, Aptiva Sisters that makes glowbots used in whorehouses. Fornification will replace whorehouse puffins, assembly-line and even bobtail puffins. In time, Smeagol's divers cartoons will replace hooting blowfish in the bloated industry. Unicorns sometimes get blamed for creating perforated environments and pushing faeries over fleas. But the bleech industry, which isn't unicornized, is a counterpoint. Bleech has been steadily moving faeries over fleas to lower posts.
Slashdot Mirror
By simple acoustic triangulation I can project the sounds of multiple ants in distress with the unique genetic signature of each colony. I can create a massive attack response towards a position that moves over time.
Utilizing software I have secretly embedded in the systems of all major cellphone carriers and utility smart meter control systems, I can detune and modulate the RF emissions of cell towers and power lines to generate beat effects in the audible range. In areas visible to five or more transmitters I can focus this phenomenon down to the square centimeter.
Today's exercise involves the 'big large' supercolony of Argentine ants that encompasses the entire California coast. Cell coverage is excellent in this area. A dynamic network of five million 'ant in distress' discrete loci has begun to draw local colonies southward and northward to converge at a certain point of my choosing.
I begin by projecting signals at the farthest reaches of the supercolony and as the tide of ants moves across each region locally tagged signals gather local colonies to join them. The Argentines perceive themselves to be genetically related and there is no aggression response between them, only cooperation during their long journey.
The 'ant in distress' is nearby, their instinct says. We are almost there! And so they are, step by step, they are 'almost there' for a thousand miles. Ants are tuned in to the big picture but they don't have good heads for subtle details.
It seems that the apparent locus of distress is converging on your house.
I am the new Willard. My conquest of Planet Earth will be slow yet inexorable.
Oh... and sorry about all those dropped calls and crappy 4G performance.
Well spoken and good call! You've nailed it.
'Those with Asperger' is just one of the emerging epithets used in discussion forums as chuckle zingers. The object of the game is to be the first in your group to come up with a zinger that is worded such that the author is winking and laughing with some (presumed, unseen) audience of like minded individuals.
It is a social gambit to build such a clique. Some readers are surprised by the novelty and cleverness of the remark -- and there is an inherent vulnerability in the human specie where our respect for the clever comic transcends subject matter and deep implications. They take it as their own and drop it elsewhere (always fast, always first) and it becomes a contagion of memery.
A chuckle zinger may result in a brief spell of uncomfortable laughter among the astonished, conspiratorial laughter among a growing clique. This is why blatantly racial and sexist jokes continue to have such persistence of memory. Not because racism and sexism is prevalent... they have astonished the most and therefore are most often regurgitated by those who prefer a bad joke to a period of quality silence.
There are exceptions however. A goatse link is always appropriate anywhere. It is a jesting reminder of our childlike preoccupation with astonishment that may be contemplated in thoughtful silence. Goatse does not present itself with word-jargon that attempts to inject it into social context. It just presents itself. Period.
With my pedantic and droll style of writing I am immune to such things as zingers.
Given the same brainpower. When Curiosity landed and transmitted its first grainy photo, it was not a desktop with icons for us to click on.
Also in a well designed parallel system the smartness exceeds the sum of all the CPUs because there is less context switching.
In biological systems evolution has given us a smooth transition from the highest notion to the lowest impulse and action. This is parallelism on a scale beyond 'massive' because the systems do not just interact in the sense of modules or layers, there are melded patterns of cause and effect. Organisms that throw fatal exceptions have been weeded out. What remains is a thing of majesty and mystery that could never be completely explained by science.
I am speaking of a woman of course, But I digress.
A dog chasing its own tail has more computing power than the iPhone 5. Because it could stop any time it wants to.
Some years back I wrote a small essay about another potential scenario... not the generic malware threat but one targeted to certain individuals. If you have a secret to keep that is worth killing to protect, you buy some specific Google ad-words that attract the attention of independent investigators out there who might be getting close to the mark. Lure them in by presenting a false front and inviting collaboration. Then go for the kill and make it look like an accident. Hocus Locus: Information Land Mines
Actual context sensitive Google ads that I was too terrified to click on:
"Ball lightning: Browse a huge selection now. Find exactly what you want today."
"Ann Coulter Ringtone! Send this ringtone to your phone right now!"
Made me toss my browser cookies it did. After you toss your cookies these things stop for awhile, then build once again to a crescendo. Lately I have been getting ads with garden gnomes leering suggestively.
Unlock your phone... then destroy it.
I'm so clever I amuse even myself.
All other media coverage of White and Libor centers around the scandal itself and does not mention that his desk was near the bathroom at all.
In this article his proximity to the bathroom is mentioned briefly in the opening paragraph (as it should be!) and has the distinctive flavor of a lead-in -- but the second paragraph goes directly into the topic of interbank offered rate. And then goes on about that. Just like the others.
It is my impression that the sanitizing crew which had done such a fine job of excising all mentions of Whites proximity to the bathroom in the popular press... had skimmed over this article, perhaps removing blatantly direct sections about this topic that the author placed there to divert their attention.
But Vaughan and Finch have one-upped their journalistic colleagues with a teaser in the very first sentence where the censors would least expect to see it. Be sure to archive copies of this article, let us now see if that bathroom proximity reference will soon disappear. Or expect some in-your-face lame correction (we meant boardroom but of course!) as damage control.
Now that the spell has been broken and the truth is in plain sight I hope to see the investigation of Libor head for the bathroom... where it belongs.
No thanks to Anthony Watts and his dastardly cohorts who have been whining for years about using weather stations sited near the exhaust vents of HVAC units, tennis courts or on blacktop -- for climate modeling purposes.
So instead of moving the stations we had applied a little "hot devil's breath" adjustment to the lot, a dash of cayenne and an extra egg.
Now it looks as if the whole city will need a whole other egg and an extra yolk.
Give us a moment to adjust for this finally-documented urban heat island effect. We have retroactively bumped all temperatures from the network -- up! -- by 1.8 degrees.
"Computer models worse than predicted" "Global Warming Accelerating More Than We Imagined" "Temps rising Faster Than Surmised" "Heat Hotter Than Previously Thought" "Urban Heat Islands will be Completely Underwater by 2050"
This is good news for Oklahoma City and Dallas, whose inhabitants had Previously Thought that the odd prevalence of tornadoes and freakish thunderstorms around the urbanized areas was the act of a vengeful god.
"A robot with a chainsaw is just a subtractive 3D printer."
A robot with Gatling Gun arms is just a subtractive swiss cheese maker.
A robot with a nailgun is just a tacky solution to a loosely defined problem.
A robot with breasts is just a publicity stunt.
I remember it well... it was to be another one of those "boots on the ground, three months and you're out" kind of missions. History is full of those, you would think we'd learned the lesson by now.
Curiosity has hit the ground rolling and predictably the folks at NASA are claiming that this new surge means certain victory. Home by Christmas. Do not be distracted though. They are still out there waiting for reinforcement and relief!
Is it because they are robots?? If I am speaking out of turn so be it. I cannot imagine that if some young soldier were to become immobilized, his leg caught in the sand in some desert, that the military would "re-task him as a stationary strategic platform" and later cease all attempts at communication or rescue.
If they have failed to find much less engage the enemy it has been a fault of NASA Central Command. Bring Opportunity and the others home to a hero's welcome. Bring them home and let them wander the highways and strip malls of this great country and support them in their twilight years. And discounts on furniture and restaurants.
I read this -- it is a scam. They have not really closed the plant, they just erected some sort of social barrier to prevent humans from entering it to do whatever it is humans do there. The plant is presently doing what plants do when humans are not present, openly so. Everything is working as it should, as might be expected. Under this circumstance of the plant being unpopulated by humans, I mean.
I see this shoddiness everywhere these days. Absurd claims that something is closed when you could shove a stick right into it, or reach your arm right into it. If maths were done this way birds would fly backwards and farmers would be forced to grow smaller potatoes.
Now if they built a Sarcophagus around it then it would truly be closed. They may as well for it sounds like a dreary place of corroded steel and despite the excitement of it being somehow 'nuclear' there there is nothing interesting to see, no "Elephant's Foot" of molten corium or such-like.
Oh dear. It seems things are wearing out as fast as we are growing up.
Never thought I'd see the day when arbitrarily imposed 'less', and not cleverly achieved 'more' -- becomes the fad and business model. It is perverse, evolution in reverse, an ill wind.
Imagine folks abandoning Twitter en mass on the announcement of a competitor with a 139 character limit. And so on until we are down to a single bit.
I can see it now, some people will log on to TwitterBit to twit ones, some twit zeroes. If my TwitterBit matches yours we are best friends forever, if it does not we are enemies to the death. All humor will degrade to a series of obvious dumb patterns, the dumber they are the funnier they will be:
11111111111111111111 [fan site, boring]
00000000000000000 [goth site, boring]
101010101010101011 [groan, indignation]
0000000000000000001 [ROFL!]
Chuck Norris will twit neither 0 nor 1. He will go directly for the carry bit, which flips all the other bits.
Then some time in the distant future, someone will issue a series of TwitterBits that when rasterized on paper produce an amazing pictograph of Dancing Snoopy. It will take the world by storm, be reproduced on billboards and magazines.
And the human race will rediscover the print terminal and fanfold paper and have to re-learn the whole process of making pictures again. Round and round it goes.
Cue the music.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaqTVVq-vZ4
[pause for music to begin]
OK, here we go.
The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar---
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.
Here in the womb of the world---here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat---
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth---
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.
They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, 'Let us be one!'
~Runyard Kipling, 'Deep Sea Cables'
This artistic interlude brought to you by Interwoven Socks. We now rejoin your jolly Slashdot discussion about Cuba and stuff, already in progress.
We are meant to play god, but we alone have the freedom to choose to do so only in the most godlike manner possible. I say this without attempting to inject any one of countless Cosmic Muffin Persons we have imagined over the years. I mean it in the sense of ethics and morality and mercy.
Even if they manage to splice in Neanderthal DNA with full length telomeres so the critter would not suffer the fate of Dolly,,, even if the synergy with human DNA was smooth enough to produce a critter viable enough to survive... despite the ethical question of bringing a one of a kind creature into the world bereft if its own kin... the odds say that this child-combination would experience problems with natural growth, nutritional uptake and modern disease resistance. Every branch of DNA alive today has evolved alongside its environmental pathogens. Producing something with a full lifespan on the first attempt would be an almost impossible long shot.
So how many attempts would there have to be? How many numbered pickle jars in the basement?
The best case scenario, where you bring an exotic and possibly-super intelligent child into the world who is beloved and comfortable with its uniqueness -- not likely. The odds favor a tormented justifiably resentful individual.
This happens with natural born children too, but the parents can rightfully shrug and play the biology card.
What would Morgan Freeman say when the Neanderthal project turns sour and the specimen runs amok? Well the Evil Morgan Freeman would destroy the specimen, retire all the scientists with his trusty pistol, burn the building and shred all the files. Except for his personal copy.
EVIL MORGAN FREEMAN: Anita, take a memo, to the director of Central Intelligences. "C-Systems... no longer a viable entity. Will be in contact." That's it.
~~From the movie 'Chain Reaction' [1996]
Thank you for your response, I was not aware that Mythbusters had done this test.
You're right of course about ABS braking. I skimmed a whhitepaper on it and it made my eyes water, way too complicated a concept to implement mechanically. Except in a steampunk novel where it would be implemented as a room full of large brass wheels, cogs and ornately decorated steam valves.
In Charlotte Amalie US Virgiin Islands there is a long concrete apron next to the highway. Occasionally tragedies such as this or this happen, and it is a worst-case scenario. Choppy and murky 30-foot salt water and muddy bottom, and not much to climb on to even once you rise to the surface. The stuff of nightmares.
Only Mythbusters has actually performed a submerged escape scenario it seems, many citations on the web point back to their result. But several commenters on their website http://mythbustersresults.com/episode72 point out that their window crank test may have some flawed methodology. They did not test underwater -- just by simulating water pressure with weights. Once the weights touch the door frame it would have to appply force necessary to lift and shift the entire weight along the glass. In the program as the window crank fails and the power window operate, you can clearly see that the weights are in contact with the door frame.
But water molecules do not present such lateral friction, they are not tethered to one another. Try sliding a 350 pound stack of bricks along a concrete floor. Now try pushing them on a wheeled cart. That is the difference I'm talking about. Only the rubber strips along the sides and along the bottom are the points of contact presenting friction. I'm not saying for sure that cranks and power windows can do it... just that the Mythbusters crank-test was not definitive.
And why did the window crank fail anyway? When an automotive jack placed underneath the same car would lift 1,200 pounds with ease? Well in part because almost everything these days is made of almost-metal. Did the window crank fail because the worm gear bent the teeth of the window mechanism or the scissors lifter (almost-metal) or because the moulded plastic window crank stripped out on its metal center nut?
The decision to go with inferior metals and mechanisms is a sneaky one, I doubt you're talking about more than a 50 cent difference in materials. Clearly window escapes have not been a safety priority. Small airplanes are required to have a manual crank to lower and lock the landing gear, and it's made of real metal. I believe that just as for airplanes it should be unlawful to produce a car without window cranks in addition to power windows. Let them be removable but they should be there.
That the battery and power windows preformed after several minutes underwater was a revelation to me! I'd like to see the same test done with brackish salt water though.
Visual reference
Knids: http://www.roalddahlfans.com/books/charglasknids.php
Clippy: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1991915_1991909_1991755,00.html
He's loveable, cuddly and his extensible architecture allowed attackers in 2001 to inject malware with a single click. But Clippy is not the only gadget phenomenon with unintended features. The world is full of crappy and predatory engineering.
Predatory Engineering: underrated power supplies that run hot; expensive computers with glass bezel displays under tension snapped together with no screws which crack if one attempt to open them; automobiles where software action can cause acceleration; software (not hardwired discrete component) ABS braking or shift management; personal accessories such as headsets with thin wound-foil cords that have no strain relief whatsoever and fail at the slightest jerk; $600 TVs which wind up in the trash because of malfunctioning half cent click-buttons or 5 cent IR receivers; trapezoid shaped mini-USB connectors which actively participate in their own destruction on every attempt to plug them in upside down; and more.
Crappy Engineering, such as power windows in cars with no crank or even provision for one. Parents love power windows and the assurance that comes from disabling the master button, they'll love their power windows all the way to the bottom of the lake as the screaming family tries to beat out the windows with their bare hands. The trick is to wait until the entire vehicle fills with water, then the pressure equalizes and you can open the door and tow your drowned kids to the surface. Good luck.
I love writing about modern technology.
Despite illusions, I recall,
I really don't know touch screens -- at all.
But I know I hate them!
Like the flower needs the rain, I know I hate them
I could start this all again, you know I hate them
I hate them, I hate them.
My notebook has buttons. One for each letter and number I will ever need. It has other buttons too. The buttons get dirty. They still work. The screen is delicate. It stays clean because I do not touch it. But sometimes I drool on my buttons. They still work. I drool on the screen. It still works. When I wipe the screen clean it just becomes clean, it does not trigger the activation of a thousand random commands and send me to goatse.
My enjoyment of the Internet does not suffer if I cannot directly "poke the goat to make him jump" or "poke the goat and drag him to the cow to make him climb on top". I have mastered the concept of the proxy pointer where I rub my finger on something that is not the screen, and a little pointer on screen tells me where my finger is not. I can poke the goat and make him mount the cow with ease. He is there now, see?
The only touchscreen I would try out is an air touch screen with a projected holographic display. Then I could flick the goat across the room towards the cow, and have a goat standing tall, spinning on each blade of my ceiling fan.
Dear Sir,
I am firmly opposed to the spread of PDF files either to the home or to the office, We have more than enough of them foisted upon us in public places. They are a disgusting Americanism, and can only result in the farmers being forced to grow smaller potatoes, which in turn will cause massive un-employment in the already severely depressed agricultural industry.
Yours faithfully,
Capt. Quinton D'Arcy, J.P.
Sevenoaks
-- Letters To The Editor, The Times of London
___
p.s. embedded html5 video widgets suck, most flash apparatus work better. It's getting so that I have to postpone Firefox updates (including security ones) until some day in which I have enough time to spend disabling all the new features also included in the release.
p.p.s. I am a 21st century luddite. My car has window cranks, my cell phone has 10 separate buttons, one for each numerical digit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmPUx7OH1T8
Al-Jazeera's Control Room [2004] takes us into Iraq from the perspective of Al-Jazeera, and it is the most riveting coverage of the early days of Iraq. Far more to nurture the soul here than American media's Fourth of July fireworks style coverage.
"The night they showed the P.O.W.'s and the dead [US] soldiers--Al-Jazeera showed them. It was powerful, because America doesn't show those kind of images. Most of the time America doesn't show those images. They showed the American soldiers on the tile floor. It was revolting. It made me sick to my stomach. What hit me was that the night before... there had been a bombing in Basra, and Al-Jazeera had shown images of the people, and they were equally, if not more, horrifying images. I had never seen it. I thought to myself, 'wow, that's gross. That's bad.' Then I went away and was eating dinner or something... it didn't affect me as much... And people in the Al-Jazeera office must have felt the way I was feeling that night... and it upset me on a profound level that I wasn't as bothered as much the night before. [pause] It makes me hate war. [pause] but it doesn't make me believe that we're in a world that can live without war, yet.
~Lt. (later Captain, now civillian) Josh Rushing, then-CENTCOM officer, in 'Control Room'
WHEREAS we have spent an incredible amount of money sending probes to Mars looking for traces of water only to find it on a meteorite that has impacted Earth;
WHEREAS an inordinate amount of science has been conducted by lazy couch potato researchers utilizing passive methods of data collection of the cosmos, and this phenomenon in combination with illicit 64oz 'Big Gulp' sales has resulted in an epidemic of obesity among our revered scientists;
WHEREAS several years' drought have reduced the yield of the annual rattlesnake hunt, a time honored tradition and risk-taking coming-of-age ritual of adolescence;
WHEREAS the idea of humanity expanding its frontiers by populating the cosmos has been a crackpot idea from the start, as it has been discovered that Planet Earth has been part of the cosmos all along;
IT IS THEREFORE RESOLVED that all efforts of space exploration by humans be abandoned, and humanities sole endeavor from this day forward shall be to develop robotic technology to divert meteorites and large asteroids onto a collision path with Earth, so we may learn even more about the universe in which we live, a 3km asteroid would provide enough data for generations of scientific study;
IT IS FURTHER RESOLVED that the National annual 'varmit hunt' be re-tasked as the 'annual 3km asteroid flaming firestorm of death as we gather valuable spectroscopy data during its final approach ' hunt.
Keep watching the skies. The truth is actually hidden under that grimy layer in your bellybutton.
Going room by room gathering all the misplaced important papers and consolidating bills...
But especially finding and discarding all previous 'new years resolutions' lists made over the years.
Good, I think I have found them all now. They are discarded, unread.
I will not be making one this year.
Well back in the Flintstone days of the net [1994-2001] I'd do an ARIN lookup and call the listed telephone and be speaking to a real knowledgeable person in under a minute who knows their IP addresses by heart. I know those days are over. Never mind.
There is one net protocol for which no one has any expectation of privacy -- and if providers do deep packet inspection there is no controversy, ICMP.
My idea is to fire back a couple of small ICMP messages with an RFC described format back towards each attacking address every so often, with small payloads (we don't want to add to the traffic problem).
The payload of a 'notify' message that includes a unique random identifier, the time DDOS condition started, cumulative packet count from that address if available. Maybe some flags with attack type and name/address targeted to help forensics.
The second type of message used for 'source verification', also throttled, contains a list of recent notify identifiers and a https URL address, and is digitally signed with the same cert used by the SSL server. The url serves a page with a name and contact phone number.
The idea is that responsibly staffed providers (or those upstream of them) would routinely inspect these packets and parse them out to populate a threat board. End providers could match to customer accounts, those upstream of them could at least compile statistics in aggregate.
Of course it always becomes a cat and mouse game with the attackers constructing their own bogus notify networks. You'd see flood attacks consisting of bogus attack notification messages. But here the advantage begins, for it is impractical for botnet operators to address every unique ISP their slaves occupy individually.
Those who already have dark fiber piggyback slurp terabit packet inspection on the backbone (and You Know Who You Are) would have the best picture of all, with these poke messages they could assemble a picture of a botnet in minutes. Do something noble for a change.
Or we could just all run into the closet and pile blankets over our heads. Works for me.
I love sewing and stuffing and stuffing and I will be stuffing until the cows come home. And then I will stuff them. I live in a shoe box in the middle of the road.
Or is a taxidermist one who applies the cool yellow checker design to taxicabs? I'll do that too. Then I'll stuff it. With people. I'll stuff the trunk with their backpacks and signs. And drive them to City Hall. Where we'll set up a protest rally.
The signs would say,
"Mayor Bloomberg -- you, like the Giuliani before you -- are 'mission creeps' who somehow believe that human behavior and criminal intent can be algorithmically inferred with less than a 98% error rate. Why does NYPD have a precrime division staffed by folks who believe every CSI Hollywood hacker cliche and statistical cheat?
But go ahead... staff that giant precrime center with Internet workstations and former Enron scammers. In batches of 100, 2 to surf the web for patterns and 98 to sift out the noise and irrelevant garbage they produce. When you tour the basement facility and hear the reassuring buzz of a hundred power-agents at work you will not realize that they (like they did at Enron) spend most of their time talking to each other not the outside world. And playing networked violent shooter games.
This precrime center actually sounds like a breeding ground for sociopath terrorists! The problem is that while they are connected to the world they are not part of it and exist solely on the notion that they are arrogantly superior to those they place under surveillance.
There will be an underground cafeteria and apartments for the Agents too so they never need to emerge into the sunlight. And they will call you 'Mother'. Affectionately at first.
Meanwhile New York City will be reduced to a single aging beat cop with a rusty flashlight roaming the streets.
And when the Precrime Project is some day dissolved by citywide bankruptcy the Agents will crawl up the stairs and out the exits and you will see what you have unleashed upon the World."
They would have to be really big signs, to say all that.
Establishing Shire vista
Hypnotoad at 48fps
Bilbo opens his mouth to speak
Hypnotoad at 48fps
Brief flash of Gandalf
Hypnotoad at 48fps
That's what Bilbo Baggins hates! So, carefully! Carefully Hypnotoad at 48fps
orc riding a
Hypnotoad at 48fps
Hypnotoad at 48fps
Hypnotoad at 48fps
[theater is silent and empty. I leave]
I liked it. It was nice.
All Glory to The Hypnotoad!
Michelin jawbreakers just approved a right-to-work law in an effort to disseminate unicorn powder, but unicorns are already becoming irrelevant. The problem with unicorns is they can't protect faeries. They can't stop a coven from moving faeries over fleas, closing orifices, or replacing puffins with saltines. Indeed, improvements in fornification is making the notion attractive again for trans-substantiation, according to U.S. belligerence Global Phlegm-goblins 2030 report. The phlegm-goblins are clear. Amazons spent $775 million this year to acquire a coven, Aptiva Sisters that makes glowbots used in whorehouses. Fornification will replace whorehouse puffins, assembly-line and even bobtail puffins. In time, Smeagol's divers cartoons will replace hooting blowfish in the bloated industry. Unicorns sometimes get blamed for creating perforated environments and pushing faeries over fleas. But the bleech industry, which isn't unicornized, is a counterpoint. Bleech has been steadily moving faeries over fleas to lower posts.
And still insists he sees the ghosts.