Little states failed much more often than empires, it's just that nobody cared very much about it (except those living there and dying in wars and famines and so on).
If this threat becomes real (that is if Apple doesn't fix the bug that enables the exploit very soon) you could build an smart adapter that makes sure that only power gets through and no data. If you think that enough people care about that go to Kickstarter and get rich.
DNA-fingerprinting of the full population will be standard. There's no way around that. In the current state of affairs this would almost be the better alternative, because fingerprinting only those who get arrested (for any reason) will just serve as a powerful deterrence against all kinds of political activity like demonstrations. At least if everyone is fingerprinted anyway the fear of being fingerprinted doesn't matter anymore.
Our societies are shaped by our tools, like it or not.
Some people seem to miss this, so: This is just an exploit over USB. The fact that the code runs on Linux that runs on a small board that you could integrate into a (somewhat bulky) "charger" has nothing to do with what is happening here.
The only REALLY interesting thing here is that they seemingly have found a new exploit for iOS. Because, believe it or not, up to now the latest iOS version is watertight, there is no way to access data on the phone via USB (or any other means) or install software on it.
At least this could mean that there will be a Jailbreak for the latest iOS sooner or later. Well, at least if someone manages to turn this exploit into some jailbreak app before Apple fixes this exploit with an update to iOS.
There's more: there was a woman who approached within arm's reach and engaged them in conversation. And now, just because they didn't happen to be killing randomly, there are probably people who think she "defused" the situation. If they would have been on a murder-spree, she'd be dead.
This woman deliberately walked up to the guys when they were talking about starting a war in London and told them 'You're going to lose, it is only you versus many'.
I can't see anything wrong with that. It was brave, yes, but not wrong. If you have common people acting like that, idiot terrorists will never win. I don't know if she "defused" anything, but she surely demonstrated a kind of confidence that is the best thing against warmongers of all kinds. Letting terrorists induce fear means letting them win.
It's important to know that this kind of quiet bravery has a tradition in Britain. The population handled the German terror against London back in WWII very similarly by going confidently about their business while the bombs were hitting left and right. Pubs were even fuller than usual, with people suggesting that occasional air raids ("maybe once a week") wouldn't be too bad and chatting about bombings like about the weather: "It's quite blitzy today, isn't it?".
Not much different during the terror bombings in 2007. Typical reaction: ""They did their worst, and they managed to disrupt our transport network and get fatalities in the low double figures. That happens on a fairly regular basis anyway, you twits. What's your next trick - a fiendish weather control device which makes it rain on a bank holiday weekend?"
Just ignore all news about this, do not argue about it, just wait.
Because IF this should work it will change the world and you won't be able to not notice it. Oil, gas and coal will become nearly worthless, geopolitics will totally change, everything will change.
If it not works, things will continue as they do.
So just don't bother. If this isn't a fake there will be no need to follow the news or to convince anyone.
First, this wasn't terrorism, it was war. Killing a soldier of a nation that kills people in a nation you view as "your" nation is not terrorism, it's plain war. Well, at least it's every bit war as drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan are war. Or are the soldiers controlling the drones from Texas terrorists and killers?
And: Snooping on all Internet communications to catch "lone wolf" terrorists is a War on the People, nothing less.
This isn't going to end well and this "attack" (on one soldier, OMG) is the smallest part of it. There are people in Britain knived down in the streets every day. Two guys decide to change the course of history and everybody is helping to get the job done. Just great, really.
Vitamin C is ascorbic acid and is used as a preservative in foodstuff for a reason (with the added bonus of not counting as preservative and sounding healthy enough to even advertise it on the packaging).
Well, maybe this is too simple. But many of these test tube results prove to be pretty meaningless because getting up to the needed concentrations in a living patient would kill him faster than the actual illness.
Funny thing is, what we do what you say to stop AGW it will be really costly, wrecking havoc with economies and ecosystems and causing migrations, wars, and collapsing economies here and there, and it will be your fault.
If you could prove that stopping (probably impossible anyway) or limiting (very much possible) AGW would be more harmful or more expensive than just let it happen, you'd have a point.
The problem is that there are just some economies or rather companies that would be harmed. And these companies are much more interested in what happens to them than in what happens to everybody else. And try very hard to make sure that what happens is good for THEM, right or wrong. The truth is the first victim in all wars and this is not different.
And we will have to stop using fossile hydrocarbons sooner or later anyway. Just because the supplies aren't unlimited and it will get more and more costly to exploit them. But again: As long as the costs can be externalized (as with fracking) this just won't stop those companies and economies.
It's very much the same as with piling up debts: You know that sooner or later you will be buried in interests you have to pay but as long as you can pay them piling up debts works fine.
The only thing that could be an eye-opener here would be truly outstanding weather/climate events happening. Like winters with freezing temperatures and snow reaching into May and June in Europe or the droughts in the US mid-west proving to be a permanent feature due to the dramatically changing air and water streams in the arctic (which again look more and more probable with the ice there melting away). Especially the US should very much care for that because irrigation in the high plains depends on (really) fossile water that isn't going to hold out for very long.
But who cares? Privatize profits and socialize costs and those who make the profits will be fine.
On the other hand if 97% of climate science papers would agree on climate change NOT happening, this would be it. Case closed. Nobody would ever talk about it again.
I think the real debate is what the consequences are from global warming. Most skeptics I know don't doubt that we impact out world. The questions we have is how large an impact that really is and whether the earth can adapt to it (without wiping us out.)
It doesn't help that the extremest on the global warming side keep giving dire apocalyptic warnings with near timelines that keep turning out false (or not anywhere near as dire as the predictions where told to us.)
NOBODY is saying this is going to wipe us out. Really. It's just going to be really costly, wrecking havoc with economies and ecosystems and causing migrations, wars and collapsing economies here and there.
All this jumping around by saying "It's not happening!", then "It's happening, but it's not caused by us!" and then "It's happening and it's caused by us but we won't be wiped out, so let's just pretend it isn't happening anyway!", but NEVER saying "OK, it's happening and it's going to be really troublesome but since it is caused by us we luckily can try to limit it by what we do!" is really strange.
But it gets less fascinating as soon as you try and find that all these automatisms misfire as often as not. Google feels more and more like a big toy store that lets you play with all the toys for free if you allow them to go through your pockets while you're playing.
Is there anything that isn't caused by global warming? It's getting silly at this point.
It's not global warming, it's us. And "global warming" is just one thing we're causing.
We're also causing a mass extinction event that began about 10000 years ago (by humans severely and extremely quickly disrupting ecosystems everywhere as soon as they arrived) and has ramped up to a point that half of all species will be gone soon, with no end of this in sight. The scale of this is similar to the handful of other mass extinctions in earth's history, the speed of it is not comparable to anything that ever happened on this planet.
Anyone who thinks that 7 billion rather large and very clever and greedy mammals aren't perfectly capable to cause a planetary catastrophe or that all the fossil hydrocarbons that accumulated over millions of years and that we dug out and burned within less than hundred years aren't perfectly capable to severely change planetary climate is just too modest.
Yeah, Google isn't filtering everything (hardly possible anyway) but it can filter what it wants and filters a lot. Giving the actual user the right to blacklist completions to his name is necessary because there's nothing else he can do. If some other website publishes things that are libel or defamation he can go after whoever publishes this. In case of auto-completions it's Google who does the publishing, so the user MUST have the right to go after Google.
So without iTunes how do you sync music from the PC to the iPhone? Say I download an MP3 album from Amazon, how do I get that onto the phone?
What about software updates? How about backing up the phone in case it dies or is lost? Can you do these things without installing iTunes or sending the data to Apple's online services?
You don't need iTunes for software updates and backups anymore.
Syncing music: Well, without iTunes you are where you would be with any other phone. Look for an app for playing/syncing music. Or just use Dropbox. Or install the Amazon Cloud Player. Whatever.
What if one of your competitors became offended when auto complete results list yours higher and has your product removed all together? Is that far? Their feelings were hurt after all.
It's not about "hurt feelings". It's about libel, slander and defamation. If you would be able to sue a newspaper if it would print the terms as a headline you should be able to do the same with Google if it does this in the auto-completion. Hurt feelings or feeling offended aren't enough here. Don't believe/. titles, they're fluff and not news.
You're the one who isn't getting it. I know where the "problem" originated. I'm pointing out that it is quite possible that some people will find the "autocomplete" suggestions offensive no matter what they are, and you might as well point this out to Google by notifying them about every possible word. The implication, which I'll spell out for the slow ones, is that I would write a perl script that would go through the online dictionary and submit every word as offensive.
You mean like any house owner in Germany could just request his house in Street View to be blanked out?
And of course you would need to point at a specific completion to your name to have it removed. Submitting a wordlist won't do. Even if you would do this it would just mean that your name wouldn't complete to anything. Hardly catastrophic.
And Google does this already anyway, just not for your name but for Google's name and for many porn-related things and who knows what else. People search for a lot of things you'll never see as a auto-completion. And if Google is redacting the completions it is responsible for what it publishes by doing this.
If a lot of people are entering the search query "Bob Somelastname pedophile" then Google autocomplete will add the word "pedophile" whenever someone types "Bob Somelastname". Google is not trying to be offensive, its just an algorithm that is based on the most common searches.
Sorry, but no. Google already filters out LOTS of things, among them many words related to porn and many things Google doesn't like to see connected to its name if you start to type "Google". Nobody knows what else they filter here. Basically Google is redacting its auto-completion heavily already.
If this were indeed a plain algorithm I would tend to agree with you. But it isn't.
So tell Google not to customize completions for "Google". And to not filter out anything related to porn. And probably lots of other things Google will never tell you about.
Slashdot Mirror
Little states failed much more often than empires, it's just that nobody cared very much about it (except those living there and dying in wars and famines and so on).
Time is easy. Until you have to bother with it in your code. Then it becomes a nightmare.
If this threat becomes real (that is if Apple doesn't fix the bug that enables the exploit very soon) you could build an smart adapter that makes sure that only power gets through and no data. If you think that enough people care about that go to Kickstarter and get rich.
DNA-fingerprinting of the full population will be standard. There's no way around that. In the current state of affairs this would almost be the better alternative, because fingerprinting only those who get arrested (for any reason) will just serve as a powerful deterrence against all kinds of political activity like demonstrations. At least if everyone is fingerprinted anyway the fear of being fingerprinted doesn't matter anymore.
Our societies are shaped by our tools, like it or not.
Some people seem to miss this, so: This is just an exploit over USB. The fact that the code runs on Linux that runs on a small board that you could integrate into a (somewhat bulky) "charger" has nothing to do with what is happening here.
The only REALLY interesting thing here is that they seemingly have found a new exploit for iOS. Because, believe it or not, up to now the latest iOS version is watertight, there is no way to access data on the phone via USB (or any other means) or install software on it.
At least this could mean that there will be a Jailbreak for the latest iOS sooner or later. Well, at least if someone manages to turn this exploit into some jailbreak app before Apple fixes this exploit with an update to iOS.
Anyone around here old enough to remember 2007?
Seriously, hype or hate, people care one way or the other. Let's wait. Well, or feed the hype/hate if you like that better.
There's more: there was a woman who approached within arm's reach and engaged them in conversation. And now, just because they didn't happen to be killing randomly, there are probably people who think she "defused" the situation. If they would have been on a murder-spree, she'd be dead.
This woman deliberately walked up to the guys when they were talking about starting a war in London and told them 'You're going to lose, it is only you versus many'.
I can't see anything wrong with that. It was brave, yes, but not wrong. If you have common people acting like that, idiot terrorists will never win. I don't know if she "defused" anything, but she surely demonstrated a kind of confidence that is the best thing against warmongers of all kinds. Letting terrorists induce fear means letting them win.
It's important to know that this kind of quiet bravery has a tradition in Britain. The population handled the German terror against London back in WWII very similarly by going confidently about their business while the bombs were hitting left and right. Pubs were even fuller than usual, with people suggesting that occasional air raids ("maybe once a week") wouldn't be too bad and chatting about bombings like about the weather: "It's quite blitzy today, isn't it?".
Not much different during the terror bombings in 2007. Typical reaction: ""They did their worst, and they managed to disrupt our transport network and get fatalities in the low double figures. That happens on a fairly regular basis anyway, you twits. What's your next trick - a fiendish weather control device which makes it rain on a bank holiday weekend?"
Terrorists can't win again THAT. No way.
Just ignore all news about this, do not argue about it, just wait.
Because IF this should work it will change the world and you won't be able to not notice it. Oil, gas and coal will become nearly worthless, geopolitics will totally change, everything will change.
If it not works, things will continue as they do.
So just don't bother. If this isn't a fake there will be no need to follow the news or to convince anyone.
That's all.
They just would have used guns instead of knifes, maybe killed ten instead of one.
First, this wasn't terrorism, it was war. Killing a soldier of a nation that kills people in a nation you view as "your" nation is not terrorism, it's plain war. Well, at least it's every bit war as drone attacks in Yemen and Pakistan are war. Or are the soldiers controlling the drones from Texas terrorists and killers?
And: Snooping on all Internet communications to catch "lone wolf" terrorists is a War on the People, nothing less.
This isn't going to end well and this "attack" (on one soldier, OMG) is the smallest part of it. There are people in Britain knived down in the streets every day. Two guys decide to change the course of history and everybody is helping to get the job done. Just great, really.
Vitamin C is ascorbic acid and is used as a preservative in foodstuff for a reason (with the added bonus of not counting as preservative and sounding healthy enough to even advertise it on the packaging).
Well, maybe this is too simple. But many of these test tube results prove to be pretty meaningless because getting up to the needed concentrations in a living patient would kill him faster than the actual illness.
Funny thing is, what we do what you say to stop AGW it will be really costly, wrecking havoc with economies and ecosystems and causing migrations, wars, and collapsing economies here and there, and it will be your fault.
If you could prove that stopping (probably impossible anyway) or limiting (very much possible) AGW would be more harmful or more expensive than just let it happen, you'd have a point.
The problem is that there are just some economies or rather companies that would be harmed. And these companies are much more interested in what happens to them than in what happens to everybody else. And try very hard to make sure that what happens is good for THEM, right or wrong. The truth is the first victim in all wars and this is not different.
And we will have to stop using fossile hydrocarbons sooner or later anyway. Just because the supplies aren't unlimited and it will get more and more costly to exploit them. But again: As long as the costs can be externalized (as with fracking) this just won't stop those companies and economies.
It's very much the same as with piling up debts: You know that sooner or later you will be buried in interests you have to pay but as long as you can pay them piling up debts works fine.
The only thing that could be an eye-opener here would be truly outstanding weather/climate events happening. Like winters with freezing temperatures and snow reaching into May and June in Europe or the droughts in the US mid-west proving to be a permanent feature due to the dramatically changing air and water streams in the arctic (which again look more and more probable with the ice there melting away). Especially the US should very much care for that because irrigation in the high plains depends on (really) fossile water that isn't going to hold out for very long.
But who cares? Privatize profits and socialize costs and those who make the profits will be fine.
Heavens. Can't you read? He's talking about "if we burn ALL fossil fuels" (emphasis mine).
Yeah, if we try really hard we might manage this. But this surely isn't the immediate problem we're facing.
On the other hand if 97% of climate science papers would agree on climate change NOT happening, this would be it. Case closed. Nobody would ever talk about it again.
I think the real debate is what the consequences are from global warming. Most skeptics I know don't doubt that we impact out world. The questions we have is how large an impact that really is and whether the earth can adapt to it (without wiping us out.)
It doesn't help that the extremest on the global warming side keep giving dire apocalyptic warnings with near timelines that keep turning out false (or not anywhere near as dire as the predictions where told to us.)
NOBODY is saying this is going to wipe us out. Really. It's just going to be really costly, wrecking havoc with economies and ecosystems and causing migrations, wars and collapsing economies here and there.
All this jumping around by saying "It's not happening!", then "It's happening, but it's not caused by us!" and then "It's happening and it's caused by us but we won't be wiped out, so let's just pretend it isn't happening anyway!", but NEVER saying "OK, it's happening and it's going to be really troublesome but since it is caused by us we luckily can try to limit it by what we do!" is really strange.
But it gets less fascinating as soon as you try and find that all these automatisms misfire as often as not. Google feels more and more like a big toy store that lets you play with all the toys for free if you allow them to go through your pockets while you're playing.
When started nerds to sneer at users of non-mainstream systems? I must have missed that moment.
It really pisses me off when warmists keep calling me a denialist. Only people with no real evidence to back up their case resort to name-calling.
Emphasis added.
Is there anything that isn't caused by global warming? It's getting silly at this point.
It's not global warming, it's us. And "global warming" is just one thing we're causing.
We're also causing a mass extinction event that began about 10000 years ago (by humans severely and extremely quickly disrupting ecosystems everywhere as soon as they arrived) and has ramped up to a point that half of all species will be gone soon, with no end of this in sight. The scale of this is similar to the handful of other mass extinctions in earth's history, the speed of it is not comparable to anything that ever happened on this planet.
Anyone who thinks that 7 billion rather large and very clever and greedy mammals aren't perfectly capable to cause a planetary catastrophe or that all the fossil hydrocarbons that accumulated over millions of years and that we dug out and burned within less than hundred years aren't perfectly capable to severely change planetary climate is just too modest.
Yeah, Google isn't filtering everything (hardly possible anyway) but it can filter what it wants and filters a lot. Giving the actual user the right to blacklist completions to his name is necessary because there's nothing else he can do. If some other website publishes things that are libel or defamation he can go after whoever publishes this. In case of auto-completions it's Google who does the publishing, so the user MUST have the right to go after Google.
So without iTunes how do you sync music from the PC to the iPhone? Say I download an MP3 album from Amazon, how do I get that onto the phone?
What about software updates? How about backing up the phone in case it dies or is lost? Can you do these things without installing iTunes or sending the data to Apple's online services?
You don't need iTunes for software updates and backups anymore.
Syncing music: Well, without iTunes you are where you would be with any other phone. Look for an app for playing/syncing music. Or just use Dropbox. Or install the Amazon Cloud Player. Whatever.
What if one of your competitors became offended when auto complete results list yours higher and has your product removed all together? Is that far? Their feelings were hurt after all.
It's not about "hurt feelings". It's about libel, slander and defamation. If you would be able to sue a newspaper if it would print the terms as a headline you should be able to do the same with Google if it does this in the auto-completion. Hurt feelings or feeling offended aren't enough here. Don't believe /. titles, they're fluff and not news.
You're the one who isn't getting it. I know where the "problem" originated. I'm pointing out that it is quite possible that some people will find the "autocomplete" suggestions offensive no matter what they are, and you might as well point this out to Google by notifying them about every possible word. The implication, which I'll spell out for the slow ones, is that I would write a perl script that would go through the online dictionary and submit every word as offensive.
You mean like any house owner in Germany could just request his house in Street View to be blanked out?
And of course you would need to point at a specific completion to your name to have it removed. Submitting a wordlist won't do. Even if you would do this it would just mean that your name wouldn't complete to anything. Hardly catastrophic.
And Google does this already anyway, just not for your name but for Google's name and for many porn-related things and who knows what else. People search for a lot of things you'll never see as a auto-completion. And if Google is redacting the completions it is responsible for what it publishes by doing this.
If a lot of people are entering the search query "Bob Somelastname pedophile" then Google autocomplete will add the word "pedophile" whenever someone types "Bob Somelastname". Google is not trying to be offensive, its just an algorithm that is based on the most common searches.
Sorry, but no. Google already filters out LOTS of things, among them many words related to porn and many things Google doesn't like to see connected to its name if you start to type "Google". Nobody knows what else they filter here. Basically Google is redacting its auto-completion heavily already.
If this were indeed a plain algorithm I would tend to agree with you. But it isn't.
So tell Google not to customize completions for "Google". And to not filter out anything related to porn. And probably lots of other things Google will never tell you about.