Cubicles really suck, especially if everyone has their own. The walls are just high enough so you can't see over them, giving the illusion of privacy. People get together and start gossiping about each other as if no one else can hear them.
You're already signed up. You don't need to press a "share" button for anything. There's no need to spend time wondering whether they're now sneakily holding on to info they shouldn't- the answer is just "yes". You don't get an annoying email every time someone you know gets heartburn. No dumb comments, no stupid advertising. There's no "friends list" to manage, no "unfriend this person" fights- they manage your friends list for you. Someone is always following you and finds you interesting. They're already synced with all your information from other sites. Their stuff works with your phone. New exciting data collection features are coming out all the time. You're already paying for it, so you might as well join, and in fact you did already. It's so easy to use.
Uhhh... so the cleantech industry receives "just as much money" as the $500 billion per year in taxpayer subsidies given to oil and gas companies? Do you have any source to support that allegation besides your CAPS LOCK key?
Here is an example for you: Please figure out what PIN I used in the following output from an AES-128 encryption:2c 5b 22 99 53 42 5b cc 4d bf a7 88 3b 61 95 14
1. I don't care about your PIN. Your grandma's will work fine. I can throw those numbers out the window.
2. For each card try 1234 (or whatever comes out of a random() call.) 1234- stolen, next card. 1234, stolen, next card. 1234- stolen, next card. 1234- *kaching*. 1234, stolen, next card. 40 million cards / (10000 plaintext PINs / (10 guesses per card) = 4000 cards.
Only "weakly encrypted" PINs. How do you "encrypt" a four-decimal-digit PIN? Even if they only had PIN hashes that were as yet uncompromised, it wouldn't offer much protection. if Target changed policy and invalidated your card immediately after you entered the first wrong PIN, the crooks still stole 40 million cards and would have scored a list of about 4000 working card numbers. At least if the PINs were required to be base-64, the crooks would only find a few.
An alliance of corporations and conservative activists is mobilising to penalise homeowners who install their own solar panels- casting them as "freeriders" - a sweeping new offensive against renewable energy, the Guardian has learned.
These people are actually freeloaders but of course he can't say what they really are because of political correctness that forces him to use softer words like "freeriders".
Further details of ALEC's strategy were provided by John Eick, the legislative analyst for ALEC's energy, environment and agriculture program.
Eick told the Guardian the group would be looking closely in the coming year at how individual homeowners with solar panels are compensated for feeding surplus electricity back into the grid.
"This is an issue we are going to be exploring," Eick said. He said ALEC wanted to lower the rate electricity companies pay homeowners for direct power generation - and maybe even charge homeowners for feeding power into the grid.
"As it stands now, those direct generation customers are essentially freeriders on the system. They are not paying for the infrastructure they are using. In effect, all the other non direct generation customers are being penalised," he said.
Eick dismissed the suggestion that individuals who buy and install home-based solar panels had made such investments. "How are they going to get that electricity from their solar panel to somebody else's house?" he said. "They should be paying to distribute the surplus electricity."
I don't want sewage electricity being forced down my throat after it's been on some other guy's filthy roof already! I'm an American; I have a right to choose clean electricity!
In November, Arizona became the first state to charge customers for installing solar panels. The fee, which works out to about $5 a month for the average homeowner, was far lower than that sought by the main electricity company, which was seeking to add up to $100 a month to customers' bills.
IN THE BEGINNING God created heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was floating on the surface of the waters. God said "let there be light" and there was light. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness with a thin film of perovskite on glass so that the material formed tiny crystalline islands. The islands absorbed photons and converted them unto electrons, whilst light striking the empty areas passed through. And God saw that it was good. Then God said "let the rooftops sprout with panels: panels bearing light from the heavens"; the ceilings brought forth electricity, freeriders yielding current with voltage in it, unto the grid. And God saw that it was good. Then to be fair he charged the freeriders $100 per month, which Arizona reduced to $5, for those who drilled the formless void of the earth for the Spirit of God, and have to distribute the unwanted surplus electricity. And God saw that it was good.
Now that we have Obamacare, why can't HIPAA be crumpled up and tossed?
The whole point of HIPAA was to keep your health info secret from insurance companies, so that they wouldn't deny you coverage or overcharge you for being a sick person. Of course, that was a stupid idea- insurers don't care about the juicy details of why you're sick. They only care about which policyholders are costing money. You obviously can't keep your insurer from finding out about the claims payments they're making on your behalf. And nothing ever seriously prevented insurers from conspiring with each other about whether to blacklist you, even if your doctors were gagged and prevented from revealing your blood type to each other.
The central feature of Obamacare is supposed to be preventing insurers from overcharging or denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions. If that's the case, then WTF is the purpose of HIPAA anymore? Keeping your spouse in the dark about your herpes? Making sure potential bosses can't google your name against "DSM-5" or "virus"? Preventing WalMart greeters from tackling kleptomaniacs? Ensuring food charities won't withhold green bananas from the terminally ill?
Since HIPAA was enacted, people have really gotten in their heads that the privacy of their health information is their most treasured possession. People are even screaming about HIPAA violations on healthcare.gov because it has a radio button for smokers to click on. But if *insurers* can't do anything with this information anymore, then who cares? Should we still be forcing sick people to make extra trips to the hospital so they can pick up their X-rays in person? This info should still be confidential, but I don't know why it deserves its top secret status anymore.
They shouldn't need to prove it's "absolutely" safe with the certainty of a mathematical proof. Obviously that's impossible. But it's not hard to define some sort of reasonable standard for what the manufacturer should demonstrate regarding safety. The FDA simply defined that standard as "nothing".
The U.S. FDA differs from the corresponding agencies in other First World countries because it has a different standard for determining safety. Usually, a manufacturer has to prove a new chemical is safe before they can put it on the market. In the U.S., the standard is different. Unless a third party can prove to their satisfaction that the product is unsafe, the manufacturer can continue to sell it. This is why bisphenol-A, for example, is used in the lining of all canned foods in the U.S. and not in other countries. Although studies have repeatedly come out indicating that it binds to estrogen receptors and mimics estrogen in some ways, the FDA has claimed that no one study in humans has conclusively proven that BPA has effects. BPA studies are difficult in humans because it's impossible to shield a control group from exposure to it- virtually all foods sold in the U.S. are laced with it, with no labeling requirements whatsoever. China has banned the use of BPA, but still manufactures millions of tons for exports to the U.S.
my guess is that 60 Minutes' primary audience these days is older people. I don't know the politics, if they even have a bent one way or the other. I doubt many people under 40 watch it.
That's a pretty accurate observation. Just look at this one-sided episode where they bash people receiving disability. It's obviously geared toward people over 65.
Further, google can't very well decide by itself that Image A127867 sent to Joe Sixpack is the same as image B835234 sent to Martha Uptight.
After all, one genital selfie might look a whole lot like another.
Sure they can. All genital selfies can be reproduced by discriminating between just two images.
With Google pre-fetching all of these, every GMAIL address id Verified for the Spammers.
But Google doesn't need to prefetch all of them for everybody. That would be merely equivalent to just flat out *removing* their "Load Images" link feature. Maybe that is what they're doing, if their marketing department has gotten vicious enough. But they may be smarter than that.
Presumably, a spammer will send the same image to a million email addresses using a unique image URL for each one. For this maneuver, all Google needs to do is load some images that arrive in emails that bounce or that are addressed to a population of dummy recipients. They can store them along with the results of any algorithm that can recognize the same image when someone else gets it from a slightly similar URL. If a few thousand dummy recipients are getting the same image from unique image URLs, they can test whether the images look the same and how they can doctor the URL in various ways without changing or losing the image. If they figure it out, they can perform the same munge algorithm on the image URL in your email, or simply display the image they have already cached from their dummy recipients without hitting the external image server at all anymore.
Your example of devious spammers using single-pixel images is a really poor one. Google probably has all those images stored somewhere already.
Its not a well thought out scheme at all. No sensible person would read Gmail with a web browser from now on. The wise choice is to use a traditional Email Client, (something like Thunderbird, Kmail, k-9 mail, Evolution, etc), and set them not to load images at all.
Or, go to Settings, click on the "Always ask before displaying external images" radio button, and then on "Save Changes".
There are plenty of reasons to avoid Google, but this one isn't very compelling.
I live in Wisconsin, seriously, that "waste" heat is NOT wasted! It's freaking cold outside!! I'm an American, I want to be free to choose!
Light bulbs are a stupid way to heat your house. The power company uses 150 watts of heat to generate that 100 watts for your light bulb, because even in Wisconsin their cooling system has a temperature above absolute zero. They can't extract all the heat energy with 100% efficiency. The waste heat is lost at the plant, and heats the air above Wisconsin, but you pay for it anyway. Turning up your thermostat is much smarter than switching on light bulbs because you're cold.
I'm not arguing, but for such a small app, Clock seems to really piss people off and I've always wondered why. Is it too simple, or complicated, or invasive, or clumsy? What is it doing wrong or not doing? What's a good replacement for it?
I assume you meant no disrespect, but "Mass" begins with a capital "M". At Mass, my brain is in fact less constrained by its need for oxygen. I pray for my own short lifespan to become greater so I can attend even more sessions of Mass. I agree there's an amazing amount of universe out there and we do need to get our act together. We need to speedily apply forces to our worst enemies and make aliens spend their time at Mass too.
"Climate change" is natural cycles, not caused by humans. NIPCC report is at http://nipccreport.com/
The report from the NIPCC ("Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change") is a piece of trash propaganda from the libertarian Heartland Institute. To confuse people, It was released just two weeks prior to the IPCC report ("International Panel on Climate Change", a board of U.N. climate experts). The real IPCC report is at http://www.ipcc.ch/.
The cop she lived next to didn't know she was autistic, and when someone kicked his screen door he assumed it must be her and had her booked on assault and vandalism charges. A judge ruled within hours to let her go and expunge her record, but those sites have her photo all over the place.
I have a dying relative that I visited a few years ago, with a Sony Handycam I got in 2004 that records DRM tapes. After her funeral I dug around in the closet and found a box with the recorder and a dozen tapes. However, Sony no longer supports their nine-year-old camera and doesn't provide USB drivers for it anymore, so the videos are apparently trapped on the tapes unless I can find an old XP system. They can only be watched on the little camera screen, and when it breaks they're gone forever. I really hate Sony.
Slashdot Mirror
Cubicles really suck, especially if everyone has their own. The walls are just high enough so you can't see over them, giving the illusion of privacy. People get together and start gossiping about each other as if no one else can hear them.
EMFDYSI?
Fix his sentence by swapping two verbs and add a preposition:
"Hickson calls Snapchat's ghost very particular and equates it to a template that can be matched easily using a computer program."
See? I'm a human, man.
As for "EMDYSI?", I thought that was a CAPTCHA for a second and was about to prove my humanity with an eight-character response.
One would think they would use an "AmIHotOrNot"-style CAPTCHA- show some snapped images, and ask "who would you most like to have sex with?"
You're already signed up. You don't need to press a "share" button for anything. There's no need to spend time wondering whether they're now sneakily holding on to info they shouldn't- the answer is just "yes". You don't get an annoying email every time someone you know gets heartburn. No dumb comments, no stupid advertising. There's no "friends list" to manage, no "unfriend this person" fights- they manage your friends list for you. Someone is always following you and finds you interesting. They're already synced with all your information from other sites. Their stuff works with your phone. New exciting data collection features are coming out all the time. You're already paying for it, so you might as well join, and in fact you did already. It's so easy to use.
And where is your link to support your $500 billion?
RTFA: Fact: The U.S. spent $502 billion subsidizing fossil fuels in 2011.
I'll match a figure you can document.
Which proves you're full of shit.
Uhhh... so the cleantech industry receives "just as much money" as the $500 billion per year in taxpayer subsidies given to oil and gas companies? Do you have any source to support that allegation besides your CAPS LOCK key?
fixing parentheses:: (40 million cards / 10000 plaintext PINs) * 10 guesses per card = 400,000 cards, not 4000.
Here is an example for you: Please figure out what PIN I used in the following output from an AES-128 encryption:2c 5b 22 99 53 42 5b cc 4d bf a7 88 3b 61 95 14
1. I don't care about your PIN. Your grandma's will work fine. I can throw those numbers out the window.
2. For each card try 1234 (or whatever comes out of a random() call.) 1234- stolen, next card. 1234, stolen, next card. 1234- stolen, next card. 1234- *kaching*. 1234, stolen, next card. 40 million cards / (10000 plaintext PINs / (10 guesses per card) = 4000 cards.
Yeah yeah. But the plaintext space is small and can be brute forced. They have 40 million cards. They don't need 40 million working PINs.
Only "weakly encrypted" PINs. How do you "encrypt" a four-decimal-digit PIN? Even if they only had PIN hashes that were as yet uncompromised, it wouldn't offer much protection. if Target changed policy and invalidated your card immediately after you entered the first wrong PIN, the crooks still stole 40 million cards and would have scored a list of about 4000 working card numbers. At least if the PINs were required to be base-64, the crooks would only find a few.
These people are actually freeloaders but of course he can't say what they really are because of political correctness that forces him to use softer words like "freeriders".
I don't want sewage electricity being forced down my throat after it's been on some other guy's filthy roof already! I'm an American; I have a right to choose clean electricity!
IN THE BEGINNING God created heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was floating on the surface of the waters. God said "let there be light" and there was light. God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness with a thin film of perovskite on glass so that the material formed tiny crystalline islands. The islands absorbed photons and converted them unto electrons, whilst light striking the empty areas passed through. And God saw that it was good. Then God said "let the rooftops sprout with panels: panels bearing light from the heavens"; the ceilings brought forth electricity, freeriders yielding current with voltage in it, unto the grid. And God saw that it was good. Then to be fair he charged the freeriders $100 per month, which Arizona reduced to $5, for those who drilled the formless void of the earth for the Spirit of God, and have to distribute the unwanted surplus electricity. And God saw that it was good.
Now that we have Obamacare, why can't HIPAA be crumpled up and tossed?
The whole point of HIPAA was to keep your health info secret from insurance companies, so that they wouldn't deny you coverage or overcharge you for being a sick person. Of course, that was a stupid idea- insurers don't care about the juicy details of why you're sick. They only care about which policyholders are costing money. You obviously can't keep your insurer from finding out about the claims payments they're making on your behalf. And nothing ever seriously prevented insurers from conspiring with each other about whether to blacklist you, even if your doctors were gagged and prevented from revealing your blood type to each other.
The central feature of Obamacare is supposed to be preventing insurers from overcharging or denying coverage to people with preexisting conditions. If that's the case, then WTF is the purpose of HIPAA anymore? Keeping your spouse in the dark about your herpes? Making sure potential bosses can't google your name against "DSM-5" or "virus"? Preventing WalMart greeters from tackling kleptomaniacs? Ensuring food charities won't withhold green bananas from the terminally ill?
Since HIPAA was enacted, people have really gotten in their heads that the privacy of their health information is their most treasured possession. People are even screaming about HIPAA violations on healthcare.gov because it has a radio button for smokers to click on. But if *insurers* can't do anything with this information anymore, then who cares? Should we still be forcing sick people to make extra trips to the hospital so they can pick up their X-rays in person? This info should still be confidential, but I don't know why it deserves its top secret status anymore.
They shouldn't need to prove it's "absolutely" safe with the certainty of a mathematical proof. Obviously that's impossible. But it's not hard to define some sort of reasonable standard for what the manufacturer should demonstrate regarding safety. The FDA simply defined that standard as "nothing".
The U.S. FDA differs from the corresponding agencies in other First World countries because it has a different standard for determining safety. Usually, a manufacturer has to prove a new chemical is safe before they can put it on the market. In the U.S., the standard is different. Unless a third party can prove to their satisfaction that the product is unsafe, the manufacturer can continue to sell it. This is why bisphenol-A, for example, is used in the lining of all canned foods in the U.S. and not in other countries. Although studies have repeatedly come out indicating that it binds to estrogen receptors and mimics estrogen in some ways, the FDA has claimed that no one study in humans has conclusively proven that BPA has effects. BPA studies are difficult in humans because it's impossible to shield a control group from exposure to it- virtually all foods sold in the U.S. are laced with it, with no labeling requirements whatsoever. China has banned the use of BPA, but still manufactures millions of tons for exports to the U.S.
my guess is that 60 Minutes' primary audience these days is older people. I don't know the politics, if they even have a bent one way or the other. I doubt many people under 40 watch it.
That's a pretty accurate observation. Just look at this one-sided episode where they bash people receiving disability. It's obviously geared toward people over 65.
Further, google can't very well decide by itself that Image A127867 sent to Joe Sixpack is the same as image B835234 sent to Martha Uptight. After all, one genital selfie might look a whole lot like another.
Sure they can. All genital selfies can be reproduced by discriminating between just two images.
With Google pre-fetching all of these, every GMAIL address id Verified for the Spammers.
But Google doesn't need to prefetch all of them for everybody. That would be merely equivalent to just flat out *removing* their "Load Images" link feature. Maybe that is what they're doing, if their marketing department has gotten vicious enough. But they may be smarter than that.
Presumably, a spammer will send the same image to a million email addresses using a unique image URL for each one. For this maneuver, all Google needs to do is load some images that arrive in emails that bounce or that are addressed to a population of dummy recipients. They can store them along with the results of any algorithm that can recognize the same image when someone else gets it from a slightly similar URL. If a few thousand dummy recipients are getting the same image from unique image URLs, they can test whether the images look the same and how they can doctor the URL in various ways without changing or losing the image. If they figure it out, they can perform the same munge algorithm on the image URL in your email, or simply display the image they have already cached from their dummy recipients without hitting the external image server at all anymore.
Your example of devious spammers using single-pixel images is a really poor one. Google probably has all those images stored somewhere already.
Its not a well thought out scheme at all. No sensible person would read Gmail with a web browser from now on. The wise choice is to use a traditional Email Client, (something like Thunderbird, Kmail, k-9 mail, Evolution, etc), and set them not to load images at all.
Or, go to Settings, click on the "Always ask before displaying external images" radio button, and then on "Save Changes".
There are plenty of reasons to avoid Google, but this one isn't very compelling.
I live in Wisconsin, seriously, that "waste" heat is NOT wasted! It's freaking cold outside!! I'm an American, I want to be free to choose!
Light bulbs are a stupid way to heat your house. The power company uses 150 watts of heat to generate that 100 watts for your light bulb, because even in Wisconsin their cooling system has a temperature above absolute zero. They can't extract all the heat energy with 100% efficiency. The waste heat is lost at the plant, and heats the air above Wisconsin, but you pay for it anyway. Turning up your thermostat is much smarter than switching on light bulbs because you're cold.
As if we need another reason for Japan to keep its heavy water out of the ocean...
Just get some Utah Boy Scout leaders to give that fault a nice shove. It's all about saving lives!
cLock -- WTF? Serioysly?
I'm not arguing, but for such a small app, Clock seems to really piss people off and I've always wondered why. Is it too simple, or complicated, or invasive, or clumsy? What is it doing wrong or not doing? What's a good replacement for it?
I assume you meant no disrespect, but "Mass" begins with a capital "M". At Mass, my brain is in fact less constrained by its need for oxygen. I pray for my own short lifespan to become greater so I can attend even more sessions of Mass. I agree there's an amazing amount of universe out there and we do need to get our act together. We need to speedily apply forces to our worst enemies and make aliens spend their time at Mass too.
"Climate change" is natural cycles, not caused by humans. NIPCC report is at http://nipccreport.com/
The report from the NIPCC ("Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change") is a piece of trash propaganda from the libertarian Heartland Institute. To confuse people, It was released just two weeks prior to the IPCC report ("International Panel on Climate Change", a board of U.N. climate experts). The real IPCC report is at http://www.ipcc.ch/.
The cop she lived next to didn't know she was autistic, and when someone kicked his screen door he assumed it must be her and had her booked on assault and vandalism charges. A judge ruled within hours to let her go and expunge her record, but those sites have her photo all over the place.
I have a dying relative that I visited a few years ago, with a Sony Handycam I got in 2004 that records DRM tapes. After her funeral I dug around in the closet and found a box with the recorder and a dozen tapes. However, Sony no longer supports their nine-year-old camera and doesn't provide USB drivers for it anymore, so the videos are apparently trapped on the tapes unless I can find an old XP system. They can only be watched on the little camera screen, and when it breaks they're gone forever. I really hate Sony.