Its as if someone from the government physically followed you wherever you went and wrote down the places where you made a cell phone call and how long you talked on the phone. The also record when and where you send a text message. Almost everyone would find this unbelievably creepy.
Of course, no human actually does this for regular citizens, and no human looks at it — unless you are being investigated, which the government don't need probable cause to do (according to their interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT act.) Then it really is as if someone had followed you and recorded all of this information.
sensors like accelerometers will be able to collect and report much more detailed information.... In addition to air quality, temperature and speed of movement are also biggies
Hmm — a computing device that can collect information about the speed, acceleration, position and temperature of its host or another object, modify its host's parameters accordingly and communicate this information to another computer. We've had "killer apps" like these for years — they're called "guided missiles".
Didn't you get the memo? It wasn't a "war", it was a "police action." On a related note, the mass incarceration of peace loving, non-violent pot smokers isn't a "police action", but a "War on Drugs." God Bless America.
Ralph Langner (the guy who figured out Stuxnet was designed to attack Iran) has been critical of the US's policies of focusing on offensive capabilities while largely ignoring or grossly underfunding defensive capabilities. He wrote a op-ed in the NYT about this. Hereis his rebuttal to Obama's executive order on critical infrastructure cyber security.
One of the problems with cyber defensive security is that too many companies use "risk assessment", which is inappropriate for security concerns. This is because risk assessment assumes that you are aware of all possible vulnerabilities and what impact these vulnerabilities will have, which is impossible. It is too easy for companies to use a risk assessment model as an excuse for not spending any money on their security, because the costs of security show up on a balance sheet while the benefits do not.
Wolfram's book, "A New Kind of Science," was called "worthless" by Freeman Dyson. Wolfram spent enormous amounts of time by himself rediscovering results, and then he presents these ideas in his book with little or no credit to the original researcher. His ideas about physics were proven by Scott Aaronson to be false, as they must either conflict with special relativity or quantum mechanics.
Here is a good book review. It turns out that the only new, useful result in this book — that Rule 110 can be used to implement a cyclic tag system — was discovered by Scott Aaronson while he was working for Wolfram. Wolfram made him sign an agreement that did not allow Aaronson to publish his results, and even made the existence of Aaronson's proof a trade secret.
Wolfram's quotations are also contradictory. He says that
“A whole bunch of things that I’ve been working on for 30 years are converging in a very nice way,” he told the audience, before launching into a rather lengthy history of Mathematica’s development. “Given how complicated things in nature are, you might think the programs running them would be very complicated,” he began. As his research progressed, however, he soon found the exact opposite: simple equations and programming could underpin enormously complicated systems.
But then the article says:
It took a lot of Mathematica code to make the Wolfram Alpha system work
It is hard to reconcile "the simplicity of Mathematica" with "it took a lot of code (and presumably a lot of time) to make it work".
This sounds uncomfortably similar to Feynman's criticism of the "top-down" method of constructing the Space Shuttle.
The Space Shuttle Main Engine was handled in a different manner, top down, we might say. The engine was designed and put together all at once with relatively little detailed preliminary study of the material and components. Then when troubles are found in the bearings, turbine blades, coolant pipes, etc., it is more expensive and difficult to discover the causes and make changes. For example, cracks have been found in the turbine blades of the high pressure oxygen turbopump. Are they caused by flaws in the material, the effect of the oxygen atmosphere on the properties of the material, the thermal stresses of startup or shutdown, the vibration and stresses of steady running, or mainly at some resonance at certain speeds, etc.? How long can we run from crack initiation to crack failure, and how does this depend on power level? Using the completed engine as a test bed to resolve such questions is extremely expensive. One does not wish to lose an entire engine in order to find out where and how failure occurs. Yet, an accurate knowledge of this information is essential to acquire a confidence in the engine reliability in use. Without detailed understanding, confidence can not be attained.
A further disadvantage of the top-down method is that, if an understanding of a fault is obtained, a simple fix, such as a new shape for the turbine housing, may be impossible to implement without a redesign of the entire engine.
The thing that's amazing is these are huge companies, and they have a lot of power, but in the United States nobody has heard of them and they're having trouble gaining traction, but it's not impossible
Change "United States" to "China", and you've just described Google's problems when they attempted to expand several years ago. Baidu is still the number one search provider in China. There are plenty more examples of this. It's not easy to predict when a product will find traction in a foreign market.
This is only a list of handguns, which you need a permit to own. It does not list rifles or shotguns, which make up a significant percentage of guns owned by Americans. Although it is more probable that the households that own handguns also own more of the rifles and shotguns than households without handguns, there are still many gun owning households that are not listed here. In fact, I know someone who lives in this area who is not listed, but has a rifle in her house.
Internet: help us out. If you’re on Reddit (we’re not) or any other nerdly social media sites where we might get information about this, feel free to post far and wide and e-mail any answers, clues, ideas, thoughts, or musings to indianajonesjournal@uchicago.edu (yes, we did set up an email account just to deal with this thing).
I believe that there is a long historical precedent for a "device, or mechanism" that "seamlessly scales" objects. They are called beer goggles, and can often be "rented" for free, worldwide.
The only reason that the FBI was able to gain access to her e-mails was because Google complied with FBI's request. So it seems that the real question is not about how vulnerable your email is to "hackers", but whether your email provider keeps your communications private.
One thing that really caught my attention in this video was a throwaway comment about the input pen. It was found to be a failure because the blood would drain from the hand after about twenty seconds, leaving the user with a numb hand. Kay then goes on to say that the input pen had been reinvented about 90 times by other people in the twenty years since the demonstration.
This underscores the importance of learning tech history. You can learn from the mistakes of others and avoid reinventing the wheel, and you can avoid being swept up in fads that plague the industry (touch based operating system, anyone?).
The initial popular vote tally will make the race look closer on election night than it really is. This is because some Western states, such as Washington and Ohio do a large portion (41%) of their vote by mail, and because the polls close later on the West Coast, which means that popular vote will not be tallied until way after a candidate is projected to win. In 2008, Obama was projected to win when the popular vote count was 50-50 — he ended up with 53.6 percent of the vote, which is an enormous difference. You can read about it here. http://www.tnr.com/blog/electionate/109533/the-popular-vote-nightmare
Not only does Paul Brown have a B.S in chemistry (which isn't hard to believe, as he is full of B.S), he has an M.D from a real, accredited university.
So the next time you think that your colleague is an idiot, use this to give you a little perspective.
DARPA did not create the internet to survive a nuclear attack. To quote David Wheeler,
"Some mistakenly claim that the Internet and TCP/IP were specifically created to resist nuclear attacks; this is absolutely not true, since its parent the ARPANET was specifically created to share large systems. Yet it’s also a mistake to claim that there was no connection between the Internet and survivable networks; the Internet TCP/IP technology is an internetwork of data packets, and as noted earlier, packet-switching of data packets was created was to be survivable in case of disaster."
Using human labor gives Apple much more flexibility to make changes to their products, because it is much easier to teach a human a new skill than it is to reprogram a robot for a task it was not designed to do. This was perfectly illustrated with the first iPhone; Jobs demanded a switch to gorilla glass from plastic (not a trivial demand) just six weks before the iPhone was scheduled to be released. you can read about it here http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-01-22/tech/30652107_1_foxconn-iphones-apple-executives.
With a name like "Bi-Fi", and an article summary that includes the phrase "Bi-Fi could help bio-engineers create complex, multicellular communities that work together to carry out important biological functions", I knew immediately that this technology was created in California.
Slashdot Mirror
Its as if someone from the government physically followed you wherever you went and wrote down the places where you made a cell phone call and how long you talked on the phone. The also record when and where you send a text message. Almost everyone would find this unbelievably creepy.
Of course, no human actually does this for regular citizens, and no human looks at it — unless you are being investigated, which the government don't need probable cause to do (according to their interpretation of Section 215 of the PATRIOT act.) Then it really is as if someone had followed you and recorded all of this information.
sensors like accelerometers will be able to collect and report much more detailed information. ... In addition to air quality, temperature and speed of movement are also biggies
Hmm — a computing device that can collect information about the speed, acceleration, position and temperature of its host or another object, modify its host's parameters accordingly and communicate this information to another computer. We've had "killer apps" like these for years — they're called "guided missiles".
Didn't you get the memo? It wasn't a "war", it was a "police action." On a related note, the mass incarceration of peace loving, non-violent pot smokers isn't a "police action", but a "War on Drugs." God Bless America.
Ralph Langner (the guy who figured out Stuxnet was designed to attack Iran) has been critical of the US's policies of focusing on offensive capabilities while largely ignoring or grossly underfunding defensive capabilities. He wrote a op-ed in the NYT about this. Hereis his rebuttal to Obama's executive order on critical infrastructure cyber security.
One of the problems with cyber defensive security is that too many companies use "risk assessment", which is inappropriate for security concerns. This is because risk assessment assumes that you are aware of all possible vulnerabilities and what impact these vulnerabilities will have, which is impossible. It is too easy for companies to use a risk assessment model as an excuse for not spending any money on their security, because the costs of security show up on a balance sheet while the benefits do not.
Yes, it was a typo. Thanks for pointing that out.
“A whole bunch of things that I’ve been working on for 30 years are converging in a very nice way,” he told the audience, before launching into a rather lengthy history of Mathematica’s development. “Given how complicated things in nature are, you might think the programs running them would be very complicated,” he began. As his research progressed, however, he soon found the exact opposite: simple equations and programming could underpin enormously complicated systems.
But then the article says:
It took a lot of Mathematica code to make the Wolfram Alpha system work
It is hard to reconcile "the simplicity of Mathematica" with "it took a lot of code (and presumably a lot of time) to make it work".
https://xkcd.com/1102/
Perhaps they can get Kim Jong-Un to show them the lay of the land. http://www.theonion.com/articles/north-korea-celebrates-as-kim-jongun-becomes-first,31085/
The Space Shuttle Main Engine was handled in a different manner, top down, we might say. The engine was designed and put together all at once with relatively little detailed preliminary study of the material and components. Then when troubles are found in the bearings, turbine blades, coolant pipes, etc., it is more expensive and difficult to discover the causes and make changes. For example, cracks have been found in the turbine blades of the high pressure oxygen turbopump. Are they caused by flaws in the material, the effect of the oxygen atmosphere on the properties of the material, the thermal stresses of startup or shutdown, the vibration and stresses of steady running, or mainly at some resonance at certain speeds, etc.? How long can we run from crack initiation to crack failure, and how does this depend on power level? Using the completed engine as a test bed to resolve such questions is extremely expensive. One does not wish to lose an entire engine in order to find out where and how failure occurs. Yet, an accurate knowledge of this information is essential to acquire a confidence in the engine reliability in use. Without detailed understanding, confidence can not be attained. A further disadvantage of the top-down method is that, if an understanding of a fault is obtained, a simple fix, such as a new shape for the turbine housing, may be impossible to implement without a redesign of the entire engine.
Full report is here http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.html
The thing that's amazing is these are huge companies, and they have a lot of power, but in the United States nobody has heard of them and they're having trouble gaining traction, but it's not impossible
Change "United States" to "China", and you've just described Google's problems when they attempted to expand several years ago. Baidu is still the number one search provider in China. There are plenty more examples of this. It's not easy to predict when a product will find traction in a foreign market.
Now all it needs is some hot new apps!
*Ducks*
This is only a list of handguns, which you need a permit to own. It does not list rifles or shotguns, which make up a significant percentage of guns owned by Americans. Although it is more probable that the households that own handguns also own more of the rifles and shotguns than households without handguns, there are still many gun owning households that are not listed here. In fact, I know someone who lives in this area who is not listed, but has a rifle in her house.
"Of course, we haven't been able to grow hands," Casares told New Scientists
Internet: help us out. If you’re on Reddit (we’re not) or any other nerdly social media sites where we might get information about this, feel free to post far and wide and e-mail any answers, clues, ideas, thoughts, or musings to indianajonesjournal@uchicago.edu (yes, we did set up an email account just to deal with this thing).
After all, it's the NTSB. It's their job to analyze and try to prevent train wrecks.
I believe that there is a long historical precedent for a "device, or mechanism" that "seamlessly scales" objects. They are called beer goggles, and can often be "rented" for free, worldwide.
"In a parallel process, the investigators gained access, probably using a search warrant, to Ms. Broadwell’s Gmail account. There they found messages that turned out to be from Mr. Petraeus." Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/us/david-petraeus-case-raises-concerns-about-americans-privacy.htm
The only reason that the FBI was able to gain access to her e-mails was because Google complied with FBI's request. So it seems that the real question is not about how vulnerable your email is to "hackers", but whether your email provider keeps your communications private.
One thing that really caught my attention in this video was a throwaway comment about the input pen. It was found to be a failure because the blood would drain from the hand after about twenty seconds, leaving the user with a numb hand. Kay then goes on to say that the input pen had been reinvented about 90 times by other people in the twenty years since the demonstration. This underscores the importance of learning tech history. You can learn from the mistakes of others and avoid reinventing the wheel, and you can avoid being swept up in fads that plague the industry (touch based operating system, anyone?).
The initial popular vote tally will make the race look closer on election night than it really is. This is because some Western states, such as Washington and Ohio do a large portion (41%) of their vote by mail, and because the polls close later on the West Coast, which means that popular vote will not be tallied until way after a candidate is projected to win. In 2008, Obama was projected to win when the popular vote count was 50-50 — he ended up with 53.6 percent of the vote, which is an enormous difference. You can read about it here. http://www.tnr.com/blog/electionate/109533/the-popular-vote-nightmare
Not only does Paul Brown have a B.S in chemistry (which isn't hard to believe, as he is full of B.S), he has an M.D from a real, accredited university. So the next time you think that your colleague is an idiot, use this to give you a little perspective.
Gillette sponsors a team of astronomers to find a planetary system of five stars. http://www.theonion.com/articles/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades,11056/ [Link contains strong language that may be considered NSFW]
"Some mistakenly claim that the Internet and TCP/IP were specifically created to resist nuclear attacks; this is absolutely not true, since its parent the ARPANET was specifically created to share large systems. Yet it’s also a mistake to claim that there was no connection between the Internet and survivable networks; the Internet TCP/IP technology is an internetwork of data packets, and as noted earlier, packet-switching of data packets was created was to be survivable in case of disaster."
Source: http://www.dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html
Using human labor gives Apple much more flexibility to make changes to their products, because it is much easier to teach a human a new skill than it is to reprogram a robot for a task it was not designed to do. This was perfectly illustrated with the first iPhone; Jobs demanded a switch to gorilla glass from plastic (not a trivial demand) just six weks before the iPhone was scheduled to be released. you can read about it here http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-01-22/tech/30652107_1_foxconn-iphones-apple-executives.
With a name like "Bi-Fi", and an article summary that includes the phrase "Bi-Fi could help bio-engineers create complex, multicellular communities that work together to carry out important biological functions", I knew immediately that this technology was created in California.
When a person has a medical excuse for not knowing their ass from their elbow.