I think one of the reasons for the re-wording was to remove the word "viruses" since it so obviously confuses people who don't know the difference between viruses and trojans and think the handful of Mac malware in 12 years is equivalent to over 17,000,000 for Windows. Sorry, but market-share doesn't account for that discrepancy.
And why not? When you can design a virus (Trojan, whatever, no one outside the tech community gives a crap what term you use) that hits 20 times as many targets, many used in industrial or commercial settings (such as what Stuxnet targeted), why would you bother trying for a Mac virus? The point of most malware isn't to hit a specific target (there are exceptions of course, but as I said before, many of them run Windows, and are usually targeted in more precise attacks anyways), but to hit as many targets as possible. In that light, it's almost stupid to bother making a Mac virus at all.
This is exactly it. Everything I ever saw from Apple on this subject said their products were immune to the large volume of PC viruses out there, which is completely and totally true. They probably changed their tune in order to avoid a waste-of-time lawsuit from people who can't read.
Not necessarily. It isn't that hard to imagine someone has created a virus (or malware, Trojan, worm) that can infect both Windows and Mac. There wouldn't be much point to it, besides "just because I can", but someone probably has.
Besides, all those embryonic stem cells are just going to the incinerator. It takes one sick, evil piece of shit to prefer incineration to the advancement science.
The problem never really was with the cells that already existed (not the main problem, anyways). The problem was that if a discovery was made with them, there would be an incentive to create embryo "farms" to produce more. It's similar to how most people have no problem performing an autopsy, but will get somewhat annoyed if you start creating dead bodies to do so, and research that required embryonic stem cells would lead to that (the argument hinging on whether you believe that human embryos are human beings or not.)
I know you are making a joke, but these stems cells were iPS (induced pluripotent), i.e. taken from adults, not embryos, and therefore not controversial by any stretch of the imagination or in any viewpoint I'm aware of. On the contrary, they show that you don't need embryonic stem cells to produce medical advances.
"Extortion"? Really? Unless mugshots.com is actually claiming you are that person, it has nothing whatsoever to do with you. People googling your name who are too stupid to realize multiple people can have the same name... well, I probably wouldn't want anything to do with them anyways.
And it can't even be extortion unless they are threatening to release the name unless you pay them money. They aren't, are they? No? Than welcome to the Internet, where 10,000 people have the exact same name as you.
Might do? You mean like mandate 3rd parties enforce UEFI Secure Boot to ensure nothing can modify the boot process? You knock out malware and alternative operating systems (arguably malware from Microsoft's perspective) in one blow.
One of two things will happen if MS does this: 1) it will have no effect because they are such a tiny player in the tablet market and trying to lock out Android/ etc will have no impact on the availability of Android tablets (not necessarily unlocked, but that is up to the manufacturers) or 2) MS will get their ass sued off for anti-trust in about 5 seconds if they try things like "you have to sell only locked tablets to get OEM prices for x86 Windows." I'm not particularly worried: MS just doesn't have the clout in that region to influence tablets, and if they try to exploit their non-tablet clout they will find themselves in a world of hurt legally.
Guess what? A house is not someone's property either except for the fact that congress made it so. How about we get congress to void all deeds (or simply not enforce them) and see what remains your property.
Not true. According to Locke's political philosophy (on which the US Constitution was heavily based), the right to physical property is an inherent human right. Government exists to protect it: it does not grant it. Same with life and liberty, or do you also think that Congress gives people the right to live? No: the right is part of human existence. The purpose of forming government is to protect it against others who would infringe on it by force, whether individuals or nations.
They hate you for coming from your fat rich economy and telling them what to do, and forcing them to sell their oil cheaply, btw.
Bull-fucking-shit. You know who largely sets oil prices worldwide? OPEC (in a manner that would be completely illegal in most of the Western world for price collusion, BTW). Do you know why the US meddles so often? Because OPEC and the Arab world in general hold so tight a fist on oil production, and have shown their willingness to strangle the rest of the world if they don't get their way. The US didn't invade Iraq the first time because it wanted to: no, it did so because Saudi Arabia asked the US to. Gave us a pretty big check to help out, too. The whole region is massively fucked up, has been for literally millennia. The US hasn't always helped, but they also haven't been the ones to start it either.
The summary specifies it was a stray cat. Who the hell tries to pry open the mouth of a stray cat? You have no idea what kinds of bacteria, viruses, or other nasty infectious things are living in a stray cat's mouth.
There have been no conclusive studies, certainly, and studies haven't shown any connection to cancer (not surprising, since cancer is linked with ionizing, not non-ionizing, radiation), but there have been studies that indicate it is possible, if unlikely, even at the few watts a cell phone operates at, for it to cause damage (see Wikipedia). I would certainly say the danger from them is negligible, given the health risks most people are exposed to, but that doesn't mean they are totally absent. Also, since radiation dissipates according to the square of the distance, being 10mm from a 1 watt transmitter (about where a cell phone in use is located) is like being 10 meters from a 1 megawatt transmitter (assuming I did my math right: a mistake would not surprise me). Obviously an oversimplification, but you get my point: despite the low power, the cell phone is also extremely close.
To anyone who is worried: don't. Cell phones intentionally limit their power to save battery life, so they are very unlikely to ever cause damage even without FCC regulations. But that doesn't mean the possibility of harm can be ignored entirely.
Non-ionizing radiation is not necessarily "completely" harmless. After all, microwaves are non-ionizing, but I wouldn't want to stick my head in one. That also doesn't mean cell phones are dangerous, just that it isn't so simple as ionizing=harmful, non-ionizing=non-harmful.
Brute-forcing is only practical when you have some known system to compare it against. For example, you can attempt to brute-force a key by using that key to decrypt the data: if you produce an intelligible result, you have the correct key (depending on the encrypting technique, there shouldn't be two keys that can be used to decrypt the date, which means if you produce an intelligible result for a sufficiently large file [i.e. more than a few words] you have the correct key). Same for brute-forcing a hash: since you know the hashing function, you can compare the hashed results from your proposed original to the hash you already know.
But brute-forcing requires you to have some known pattern to test against. If you are simply guessing at the date encoded in a message, without some known pattern or method to compare your proposed brute-forced result against, you cannot arrive at any result. For example, if all I know is that you said a 4 letter word, but have no actual pattern to compare a brute-force attempt against, I cannot brute-force it. Sure, I can go through every possible 4-letter word... but I have no means of verifying that any of them were what you actually said.
That is why one-time pads are unbreakable. There doesn't even need to be an infinite number of possible plain-texts, although for each bit you add that number grows exponentially (such that a message of a few thousand words becomes impossible to brute-force all possible combinations in the remaining life of the universe), but since you have no means whatsoever of verifying that any of the possible combinations are what was actually said, you cannot meaningfully break the encryption by brute-forcing it. For any large data-sets, there is a near-infinite number of plaintext interpretations that will fit, and unless you have some pattern to compare against, you will never be able to determine which was actually said.
To illustrate this example, someone could encode a Shakespeare play with a one-time pad, and an attempt to "brute-force" that is equally likely to return the first few chapters of Twilight as it is Shakespeare (more, actually, since Twilight uses a smaller and more common vocabulary [I assume, not having read Twilight]). Unless you know the one-time pad that was used, though, you cannot compare the plain-text to the encrypted text, which means you will never be able to know what was actually said. This assumes the one-time pad was actually random: if there is any pattern at all, there will be some means, theoretically, to determine what it is. That is why true random one-time pads were proven unbreakable: because they cannot even be brute-forced.
No, you can't. There is nothing to "brute force": the current and voltage is essentially random. You can't brute-force that for the same reason you can't brute-force a one-time pad: there is nothing to brute-force. Also, while I'm not sure, I don't think Alice needs to know the current and voltage: it looks to me like only Bob does (Alice attaches a resistor with the resistance she wants, Bob does so randomly, Bob compares the current he sees with what it was originally minus the resistor he attached: only Bob needs to know the original current). The only way to decrypt the data stream is if you know what resistor either side attached, and you can't do that without adding energy to the system, which Bob will notice (Alice too if she knows what the current was originally, but that would mean Alice and Bob already have a shared randomness, which means they don't need any tricks to encode a message: they can just use that randomness as a one-time pad).
The government can ask for whatever they like, which is what they are doing. It sounds like it is completely up to Ebay to cooperate or not: they aren't "demanding" the names. If they start forcing Ebay to cooperate, that would be a little different. Also, the fact they are publicizing this is a good thing, rather than simply asking behind the scenes.
Dog == wolf == dingo, yes (they are all in the canis lupus species). The other three are different species, but bonobos and common chimps are both often referred to as chimps: the only real reason they are considered separate species is that they have never been observed to interbreed (which doesn't mean they can't). They do have a few physical differences, but then again so do Asians and Caucasians.
Continuing to have sex with someone after they express their unwillingness, however, can be a crime (and might be classified as "rape"). Why the woman in question chose to protest is irrelevant. He isn't being charged with having sex without a condom: he is being charged with having sex over the protests of his partner.
You can claim she is accusing him not because she feels genuinely violated, but because of political reasons, and you may be right, but what he did could be considered a crime in Sweden and the UK, and just about everywhere else in the western world, depending on the facts of the case. But then, that is why he is being deported for questioning: so they can figure out what those facts are.
Actually the current plans are going away. You can still use them if you already have one, but they are no longer available for new customers or customers who are upgrading to a smartphone. You also can't hang on to old unlimited data plans if you are upgrading, period (unless you pay full price for the phone, of course, although don't be surprised if Verizon "helpfully" upgrades you to the new plans anyways, wireless carriers have been known to do that in the past), though they can shift to a tiered plan, for now. Expect Verizon to phase those out completely as well in 2-3 years, just like they are with their unlimited data plans.
This is completely 100% false. THERE ARE NO OTHER PLANS. From the Q&A linked in TFA
Q: I'm single and I just want a smartphone, that's it. The cheapest Shared Everything plan looks pretty expensive at $90 per month, and that's with just 1 gigabyte of data. Is there no alternative?
A: There's one cheaper plan, intended for first-time smartphone buyers. It gives you unlimited calling and texting, and just 300 megabytes of data per month. If you're frugal with data usage, that will get you by. It costs $80 per month.
In other words, you can do this plan for 1GB of data, or pay $80 for 300MB of data (basically, $40 for 300MB of data, since the phone access costs $40), or you can not buy a smartphone from Verizon. There are literally no other options for new customers.
You are being a little dense. Previously, up to 2GB of data would have cost me $30 a month. Now it will cost $50 a month, for 1GB. Before that, $30 would have gotten unlimited data.
So from a consumer point of view, the deal has gotten worse and worse. And it still costs money to add devices to the plan for data sharing, leaving this an all-around shitty deal.
That's why I said "from the practical side", i.e. as someone interesting in making a program that works, rather than in designing a programming language or taking on a project for fun. Obviously, there is a tremendous value in knowing the underlying mechanics, ideally all the way down to the bare metal. But if all you need to do is create something that performs a function, that understanding adds little in value. My example with the car was, I thought, a pretty good illustration: obviously, someone needs to know how to build a car. The person driving it, though, doesn't, and I would argue that forcing them to understand the design just to drive it is counter-productive. Specialization is a highly useful tool in modern society, so the more people can perform practical functions outside their field of expertise (where a theoretical knowledge actually is important, at least usually), e.g. a non-techie writing a fairly simple program, the better society can function.
I don't know how sensitive the detector they are using is, but they should also be able to detect the fluorine molecules (which outnumber the carbon 2 to 1, unlike what TFA claims). I don't imagine they expect to find a lot of fluorine in the rocks on Mars, so the presence of fluorine indicates the sample is contaminated and they should ignore the carbon. If the analysis is really sensitive, they could even correlate the amount of fluorine with the expected amount of carbon (since it should be exactly 2 to 1), allowing the contaminating carbon to be eliminate from the analysis.
This assumes the fluorine can be accurately analyzed, which may be a major issue since it is extremely reactive. I'm not a chemist, though, so I don't know how big an issue that could be.
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I think one of the reasons for the re-wording was to remove the word "viruses" since it so obviously confuses people who don't know the difference between viruses and trojans and think the handful of Mac malware in 12 years is equivalent to over 17,000,000 for Windows. Sorry, but market-share doesn't account for that discrepancy.
And why not? When you can design a virus (Trojan, whatever, no one outside the tech community gives a crap what term you use) that hits 20 times as many targets, many used in industrial or commercial settings (such as what Stuxnet targeted), why would you bother trying for a Mac virus? The point of most malware isn't to hit a specific target (there are exceptions of course, but as I said before, many of them run Windows, and are usually targeted in more precise attacks anyways), but to hit as many targets as possible. In that light, it's almost stupid to bother making a Mac virus at all.
This is exactly it. Everything I ever saw from Apple on this subject said their products were immune to the large volume of PC viruses out there, which is completely and totally true. They probably changed their tune in order to avoid a waste-of-time lawsuit from people who can't read.
Not necessarily. It isn't that hard to imagine someone has created a virus (or malware, Trojan, worm) that can infect both Windows and Mac. There wouldn't be much point to it, besides "just because I can", but someone probably has.
This really needs to stop.
The number of pageviews the Washington Post got by running that article begs to differ.
All Google's Nexus devices have unlockable bootloaders, as they are designed partly for developers to play around with customizing Android.
Besides, all those embryonic stem cells are just going to the incinerator. It takes one sick, evil piece of shit to prefer incineration to the advancement science.
The problem never really was with the cells that already existed (not the main problem, anyways). The problem was that if a discovery was made with them, there would be an incentive to create embryo "farms" to produce more. It's similar to how most people have no problem performing an autopsy, but will get somewhat annoyed if you start creating dead bodies to do so, and research that required embryonic stem cells would lead to that (the argument hinging on whether you believe that human embryos are human beings or not.)
I know you are making a joke, but these stems cells were iPS (induced pluripotent), i.e. taken from adults, not embryos, and therefore not controversial by any stretch of the imagination or in any viewpoint I'm aware of. On the contrary, they show that you don't need embryonic stem cells to produce medical advances.
"Extortion"? Really? Unless mugshots.com is actually claiming you are that person, it has nothing whatsoever to do with you. People googling your name who are too stupid to realize multiple people can have the same name... well, I probably wouldn't want anything to do with them anyways.
And it can't even be extortion unless they are threatening to release the name unless you pay them money. They aren't, are they? No? Than welcome to the Internet, where 10,000 people have the exact same name as you.
Might do? You mean like mandate 3rd parties enforce UEFI Secure Boot to ensure nothing can modify the boot process? You knock out malware and alternative operating systems (arguably malware from Microsoft's perspective) in one blow.
One of two things will happen if MS does this: 1) it will have no effect because they are such a tiny player in the tablet market and trying to lock out Android/ etc will have no impact on the availability of Android tablets (not necessarily unlocked, but that is up to the manufacturers) or 2) MS will get their ass sued off for anti-trust in about 5 seconds if they try things like "you have to sell only locked tablets to get OEM prices for x86 Windows." I'm not particularly worried: MS just doesn't have the clout in that region to influence tablets, and if they try to exploit their non-tablet clout they will find themselves in a world of hurt legally.
Guess what? A house is not someone's property either except for the fact that congress made it so. How about we get congress to void all deeds (or simply not enforce them) and see what remains your property.
Not true. According to Locke's political philosophy (on which the US Constitution was heavily based), the right to physical property is an inherent human right. Government exists to protect it: it does not grant it. Same with life and liberty, or do you also think that Congress gives people the right to live? No: the right is part of human existence. The purpose of forming government is to protect it against others who would infringe on it by force, whether individuals or nations.
They hate you for coming from your fat rich economy and telling them what to do, and forcing them to sell their oil cheaply, btw.
Bull-fucking-shit. You know who largely sets oil prices worldwide? OPEC (in a manner that would be completely illegal in most of the Western world for price collusion, BTW). Do you know why the US meddles so often? Because OPEC and the Arab world in general hold so tight a fist on oil production, and have shown their willingness to strangle the rest of the world if they don't get their way. The US didn't invade Iraq the first time because it wanted to: no, it did so because Saudi Arabia asked the US to. Gave us a pretty big check to help out, too. The whole region is massively fucked up, has been for literally millennia. The US hasn't always helped, but they also haven't been the ones to start it either.
The summary specifies it was a stray cat. Who the hell tries to pry open the mouth of a stray cat? You have no idea what kinds of bacteria, viruses, or other nasty infectious things are living in a stray cat's mouth.
Although we certainly know now.
According to Ars Technica, you can switch between 32-bit and 64-bit with the same key. The re-install is an issue, of course, but it can be done.
There have been no conclusive studies, certainly, and studies haven't shown any connection to cancer (not surprising, since cancer is linked with ionizing, not non-ionizing, radiation), but there have been studies that indicate it is possible, if unlikely, even at the few watts a cell phone operates at, for it to cause damage (see Wikipedia). I would certainly say the danger from them is negligible, given the health risks most people are exposed to, but that doesn't mean they are totally absent. Also, since radiation dissipates according to the square of the distance, being 10mm from a 1 watt transmitter (about where a cell phone in use is located) is like being 10 meters from a 1 megawatt transmitter (assuming I did my math right: a mistake would not surprise me). Obviously an oversimplification, but you get my point: despite the low power, the cell phone is also extremely close.
To anyone who is worried: don't. Cell phones intentionally limit their power to save battery life, so they are very unlikely to ever cause damage even without FCC regulations. But that doesn't mean the possibility of harm can be ignored entirely.
Non-ionizing radiation is not necessarily "completely" harmless. After all, microwaves are non-ionizing, but I wouldn't want to stick my head in one. That also doesn't mean cell phones are dangerous, just that it isn't so simple as ionizing=harmful, non-ionizing=non-harmful.
Brute-forcing is only practical when you have some known system to compare it against. For example, you can attempt to brute-force a key by using that key to decrypt the data: if you produce an intelligible result, you have the correct key (depending on the encrypting technique, there shouldn't be two keys that can be used to decrypt the date, which means if you produce an intelligible result for a sufficiently large file [i.e. more than a few words] you have the correct key). Same for brute-forcing a hash: since you know the hashing function, you can compare the hashed results from your proposed original to the hash you already know.
But brute-forcing requires you to have some known pattern to test against. If you are simply guessing at the date encoded in a message, without some known pattern or method to compare your proposed brute-forced result against, you cannot arrive at any result. For example, if all I know is that you said a 4 letter word, but have no actual pattern to compare a brute-force attempt against, I cannot brute-force it. Sure, I can go through every possible 4-letter word... but I have no means of verifying that any of them were what you actually said.
That is why one-time pads are unbreakable. There doesn't even need to be an infinite number of possible plain-texts, although for each bit you add that number grows exponentially (such that a message of a few thousand words becomes impossible to brute-force all possible combinations in the remaining life of the universe), but since you have no means whatsoever of verifying that any of the possible combinations are what was actually said, you cannot meaningfully break the encryption by brute-forcing it. For any large data-sets, there is a near-infinite number of plaintext interpretations that will fit, and unless you have some pattern to compare against, you will never be able to determine which was actually said.
To illustrate this example, someone could encode a Shakespeare play with a one-time pad, and an attempt to "brute-force" that is equally likely to return the first few chapters of Twilight as it is Shakespeare (more, actually, since Twilight uses a smaller and more common vocabulary [I assume, not having read Twilight]). Unless you know the one-time pad that was used, though, you cannot compare the plain-text to the encrypted text, which means you will never be able to know what was actually said. This assumes the one-time pad was actually random: if there is any pattern at all, there will be some means, theoretically, to determine what it is. That is why true random one-time pads were proven unbreakable: because they cannot even be brute-forced.
No, you can't. There is nothing to "brute force": the current and voltage is essentially random. You can't brute-force that for the same reason you can't brute-force a one-time pad: there is nothing to brute-force. Also, while I'm not sure, I don't think Alice needs to know the current and voltage: it looks to me like only Bob does (Alice attaches a resistor with the resistance she wants, Bob does so randomly, Bob compares the current he sees with what it was originally minus the resistor he attached: only Bob needs to know the original current). The only way to decrypt the data stream is if you know what resistor either side attached, and you can't do that without adding energy to the system, which Bob will notice (Alice too if she knows what the current was originally, but that would mean Alice and Bob already have a shared randomness, which means they don't need any tricks to encode a message: they can just use that randomness as a one-time pad).
The government can ask for whatever they like, which is what they are doing. It sounds like it is completely up to Ebay to cooperate or not: they aren't "demanding" the names. If they start forcing Ebay to cooperate, that would be a little different. Also, the fact they are publicizing this is a good thing, rather than simply asking behind the scenes.
i'm going to run out and buy a Mac for twice the price of a PC just so i don't have to look at this
You don't need to. My clean PC runs Xubuntu.
Clean, precise, pangolin-powered. MyCleanPC.
Yeah, but will it speed up the gigabits in my router?
Dog == wolf == dingo, yes (they are all in the canis lupus species). The other three are different species, but bonobos and common chimps are both often referred to as chimps: the only real reason they are considered separate species is that they have never been observed to interbreed (which doesn't mean they can't). They do have a few physical differences, but then again so do Asians and Caucasians.
Continuing to have sex with someone after they express their unwillingness, however, can be a crime (and might be classified as "rape"). Why the woman in question chose to protest is irrelevant. He isn't being charged with having sex without a condom: he is being charged with having sex over the protests of his partner.
You can claim she is accusing him not because she feels genuinely violated, but because of political reasons, and you may be right, but what he did could be considered a crime in Sweden and the UK, and just about everywhere else in the western world, depending on the facts of the case. But then, that is why he is being deported for questioning: so they can figure out what those facts are.
Actually the current plans are going away. You can still use them if you already have one, but they are no longer available for new customers or customers who are upgrading to a smartphone. You also can't hang on to old unlimited data plans if you are upgrading, period (unless you pay full price for the phone, of course, although don't be surprised if Verizon "helpfully" upgrades you to the new plans anyways, wireless carriers have been known to do that in the past), though they can shift to a tiered plan, for now. Expect Verizon to phase those out completely as well in 2-3 years, just like they are with their unlimited data plans.
This is completely 100% false. THERE ARE NO OTHER PLANS. From the Q&A linked in TFA
Q: I'm single and I just want a smartphone, that's it. The cheapest Shared Everything plan looks pretty expensive at $90 per month, and that's with just 1 gigabyte of data. Is there no alternative?
A: There's one cheaper plan, intended for first-time smartphone buyers. It gives you unlimited calling and texting, and just 300 megabytes of data per month. If you're frugal with data usage, that will get you by. It costs $80 per month.
In other words, you can do this plan for 1GB of data, or pay $80 for 300MB of data (basically, $40 for 300MB of data, since the phone access costs $40), or you can not buy a smartphone from Verizon. There are literally no other options for new customers.
You are being a little dense. Previously, up to 2GB of data would have cost me $30 a month. Now it will cost $50 a month, for 1GB. Before that, $30 would have gotten unlimited data.
So from a consumer point of view, the deal has gotten worse and worse. And it still costs money to add devices to the plan for data sharing, leaving this an all-around shitty deal.
That's why I said "from the practical side", i.e. as someone interesting in making a program that works, rather than in designing a programming language or taking on a project for fun. Obviously, there is a tremendous value in knowing the underlying mechanics, ideally all the way down to the bare metal. But if all you need to do is create something that performs a function, that understanding adds little in value. My example with the car was, I thought, a pretty good illustration: obviously, someone needs to know how to build a car. The person driving it, though, doesn't, and I would argue that forcing them to understand the design just to drive it is counter-productive. Specialization is a highly useful tool in modern society, so the more people can perform practical functions outside their field of expertise (where a theoretical knowledge actually is important, at least usually), e.g. a non-techie writing a fairly simple program, the better society can function.
I don't know how sensitive the detector they are using is, but they should also be able to detect the fluorine molecules (which outnumber the carbon 2 to 1, unlike what TFA claims). I don't imagine they expect to find a lot of fluorine in the rocks on Mars, so the presence of fluorine indicates the sample is contaminated and they should ignore the carbon. If the analysis is really sensitive, they could even correlate the amount of fluorine with the expected amount of carbon (since it should be exactly 2 to 1), allowing the contaminating carbon to be eliminate from the analysis.
This assumes the fluorine can be accurately analyzed, which may be a major issue since it is extremely reactive. I'm not a chemist, though, so I don't know how big an issue that could be.