It's kind of hard for plain text and images to do bad things though I suppose it's been done before.
There have been vulnerabilities in PNG and JPG image format handlers in the past, so yes, there has definitely been the potential to have images do bad things. (Arguably none would be as bad as using some of the ones relating to goatse, but that's a different kind of problem.) If you hear of problems in fundamental media type handlers, for goodness sake make sure you're up to date with your security patches!
I don't know if there were any exploits of those problems in the wild though.
I have more than once been the one advocating for IE's removal and replacement with Firefox.
I've been using non-IE for years without feeling the lack, but if you depend on some awful ActiveX monstrosity for your business, I can see a lack of willingness to upgrade as being sensible. It's also a good reason for having a cry in the corner, but there you go.
MBAs are toxic in any position other than CEO. CPAs should run Finance divisions, engineers should run Engineering divisions, salesmen should run Marketing. MBAs should push mail carts, or mops, until they get it.
The problem isn't people with an MBA. The problem is that there are specialist MBAs; they only know being an MBA, an abstraction of being a manager. The people who have real experience (sales, finance, engineering, whatever) and also an MBA are usually OK as they know when the management theory is full of shit.
All theory isn't exactly correct in all details, that's what makes it theory. (OTOH, a theory also helps you stop getting bogged down in all the details, so it's still valuable to have. The theory/practice balance is an interesting dynamic.)
For many image manipulators, other software like Pixelmator or Seashore/GIMP would provide enough control at a fraction of the price. It's missing some features like layer styles, but it has the basics, and comparing 'cloud' pricing to buying and owning software would make many people consider living with the lost features.
It may also encourage developers of those systems to work on adding the features (or equivalents) that are missing. Now I'm not saying it will for sure, or that it will be easy, but once the fundamental design work is done it is far easier to replicate; there's a model to test against, and a language for users to describe their requirements to developers in.
Won't work on it myself though; I hate image manipulation work (whether doing it by hand or using a program).
This may be a very rare thing indeed: The commerce clause being used as intended.
Congress also has got the power to levy taxes; the SCOTUS ruled on that recently, so don't expect any change there for quite a while. If Congress choses to introduce a national sales tax, challenging its legality would be really hard. (It would also encourage harmonization of in-state sales taxes, as vendors will prefer to have one tax rate if they can't have zero taxes, but that's by-the-by.)
I think you'll find that the jet engine was a "tremendous leap" over the Wright Flier...
There were a few other key step changes along the way, such as the switch away from using wing warping to create control surfaces, the first rotary engines, the first engines to use air compressors (which may have preceded jet engines; I'm not sure), and the first supersonic aircraft (which need radically different wing shapes). Scramjets are still an interesting addition to that line of key changes though.
You either "get" how to drive a hybrid, or you don't.
You not only have to "get" it, you also have to be willing to drive like that. Which knocks out another significant chunk of the population.
I'd say that "get"ting it includes having the willingness to act in a sane way. The silly thing is, provided you're willing to actually spend some thought trying to predict what other drivers are doing and observe what the environment is like, driving in a fuel-efficient way costs virtually no time. Maximizing your efficiency means braking as little as possible (bearing in mind that being in a collision is a critical loss of efficiency!) and accelerating gently. You also have to leave a bit larger gap between yourself and the vehicle in front so that you've got time to act if they do something odd.
The plus side of this is that it reduces the impact of braking waves in heavy traffic (you know, where some idiot at the front sees a cute squirrel or something and hits the brakes a little, causing the idiots behind to brake more heavily and sending a wave of stopped traffic backwards through the queue; they're a feature of heavy traffic, especially when most drivers are acting unintelligently).
Drive Smart! It's good for your blood pressure and your wallet!
Yes. They're a variation of craziness, largely on the left of politics, that feels the most important thing is changing the way the head of state is selected. (You know, instead of getting the economy moving properly again, things like that.)
There's also the equivalent of US Republicans; they're called Conservatives, and they're feeling rather worried by a minor party called UKIP right now (who could be likened to the Tea Party I suppose, but they're not the same; the details of politics really vary a lot between countries, even if the smell emanating from it doesn't change nearly so much).
Unfortunately, the price we pay is very steep. If it my child were killed in a school shooting, I'm sure I'd feel differently.
Perhaps you should hand out "Martyr for Freedom! Sponsored by the NRA!" medals to all the parents who lose children in school shootings. I'm sure they'd feel much better after that.
You dont need a CNC mill. Let me guess, you think you need a supercomputer to write iphone apps? You can make a gun with rudimentary tools that are in many people's garages. How do you think gun smiths in the 1800's did things? You think they fired up their CNC mill and had their horse program the computer to start cutting?
To counterpoint: small gunsmiths in the 19th century didn't (usually) produce as high quality armaments as those you got from somewhere with a good set of machine tools.
FWIW, I think there are more interesting thing to do with computer-driven machine tools than make firearms; why make a gun when you can work on making a robot that can fetch you a beer and a packet of potato chips? Get your priorities right; overthrowing the government isn't likely to happen today, but getting thirsty is.
More relevantly though, this mechanism allows you to get summary data without the server knowing what those summary values are. That might or might not be important.
Damn, hit submit and thought of another point immediately! What I'm not sure of is whether you could hide what type of operation is being performed. Would the server be able to know you're calculating a maximum or an average, even if not what it is? My understanding of the details of homomorphic encryption is rather shaky so I can't be sure about that...
However, with homomorphic encryption we can hide even that!
Since I can evaluate any program homomorphically over my data, I write a program that says "return file number x" and give it an encrypted value, say 50, for x. The server now evaluates this program, with my encrypted 50, over the entire set of files. What he gives back to me is my file that I wanted, but from his point of view he can't actually tell which file he gave me! All he knows is he ran a circuit over all the files in the database, with my input that specifies which one I want, but he can't tell what my input is because it is encrypted.
You're overselling it. The server can still apply its own labeling (and probably will!) and perform traffic analysis over that; you're still providing a decision procedure even if an elaborate one. What he doesn't learn is what your labeling is, but since you could be using an arbitrary labeling in the first place that's not a huge step forward.
More relevantly though, this mechanism allows you to get summary data without the server knowing what those summary values are. That might or might not be important.
Point of order: there are proscriptive standards, backed up by laws of various kinds, but not so much in the area of online information systems. An example of a set of proscriptive standards is the definition of weights and measures; while many goods can be sold in any quantity, the vendor has to at least correctly describe the amount that is being sold.
By definition that means that Flash has a broken DRM implementation.
Stating the obvious, eh? (DRM is always formally broken. Providing the encrypted content and the code to decrypt it and the keys to use, and then not expecting it to get broken? Hah!)
And wait for the security issues which arise! In 5, 4, 3, 2,...
As opposed to the ones in Flash and Silverlight and Java and...? Now isn't the time to be closing that stable door. The horse has bolted. The stable has burnt down, the remnants bulldozed, and a chic little apartment block built instead.
The big problem is what it always was: writing a secure plugin is mind-bogglingly hard. (It's doubly hard when marketing wants "just another feature" all the time, as feature-sets aren't simply composeable without non-trivial consequences.) I'm just waiting for someone to figure out a fundamental problem in Javascript (or a major implementation of it), when all the securetards will run around screaming that the world is ending. It will happen, people make blunders all the time and their reactions are (almost) entirely predictable.
The time off is given for the 'family' not for medical recovery. The time off is so mom can be with her child, not because she is recovering. She isn't even taking care of the child for the most part during her 'recovery' period, its only after that when she starts doing her job.
A substantial part of the reason for extended time off is that, to start out with, babies need feeding during the night. Preferably with fresh breast milk. Mum spends her time being shattered, and is mostly not awake enough to be actively holding down a job as well. It's fairer on her colleagues for her to be off for at least a few months until daytime-only feeding is established. The time to do that depends on the child, but it is easier for her employer to give a bit more time off than strictly necessary so that a predictable stand-in can be used.
The only sane alternative is to just sack people for getting pregnant and carrying the child to term. That's deemed socially unacceptable by a majority of people on both the left and the right.
And by the way, nuclear is cheap. What makes it expensive is delays. Delays caused by endless lawsuits of people utterly afraid of nuclear power. And so we CAN'T build new nuclear power plants. Instead of taking 3-4 years, they take maybe 3 decades as construction is stopped by the courts until being given approval to proceed. At, say, 10% interest rate, over 25 or so years that increases the cost by/an order of magnitude/ over what it would be with a quick construction. That is 90% of the reason for the supposed high cost of new nuclear power. This is cited by opponents of nuclear power as reason for why we should oppose nuclear power, but that is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy because lawsuits and political opposition slow down new construction. Meanwhile, we're doubling and soon tripling the carbon dioxide levels.
This suggests that the real way forward is to use lawsuits to stop new coal, oil and gas plants! Fight fire with writs! Bwahahahahaa!
Sorry. Just had to let a quick evil laugh out there.
But blackberry and apple is an awesome combination in a pie.
Re:Maybe our universe is a 'matter bubble'
on
Does Antimatter Fall Up?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It would seem that antimatter could only fall up, if there was some way to distinguish gravitational and inertial mass. From my experience of how electrons and positrons were accelerated at SLAC, their inertial mass was identical. The only difference between them was their charge.
This is why it is important to conduct the experiment to see if the gravitational and inertial mass of antimatter are the same. Sure, we know that they're the same thing for ordinary matter and that antimatter and matter have the same inertial mass, but the effect hasn't been properly studied for antimatter (because that's a furiously difficult experiment). It could be that gravitational and inertial mass are the same for AM; that would be the most likely expected case, and we wouldn't learn that much about new physics if that's true. But we haven't checked, and so we must do so to make sure. After all, if they were different that would be a really important fact about the universe that we are currently unaware of. (It would be far more important than finding the Higgs boson.)
Let the experiment be done. Let us find out if the universe is even stranger than we thought it was. It's this sort of thing that a fundamental physics lab should study.
Yeah, but a good "Oh shit! Look ahead of you!" is still better than having someone on the other end of a phone. The person calling has no idea what is going on at your end and cannot have such an idea. Well, not unless you're giving someone a running commentary or something, but that's really not the case we're worried about.
There's been enough experience with people having talkative passengers, using phones and texting while driving to actually ground it in statistics. Passengers are safer than calls, and texting is far more dangerous than both. (If you've got a passenger, let them take the call and do the texting; even safer still!)
Two of the three most popular desktop OS famillies (windows and linux) don't have proper provisions for resolution independent font and window sizes.
The problem is that they tend to mis-report the physical size of the viewable area of the displays, without which you can't work out the scaling factor. (The low-level font rendering engine wants pixel-based sizes for obvious reasons, though you might well not be normally working at that level.) However, a bigger problem in practice is that the non-text parts of windows are not designed with scaling in mind. The most obvious example of that is where someone uses absolute positions for all the components within a window — the window becomes impossible to even resize correctly, never mind scale! — but it certainly isn't the only issue in the area. Far too much GUI programming is done with special magic values for things like borders and inter-component spaces, even now.
Hard work and brains are also not necessarily unethical.
Nor are they necessarily ethical. After all, it took a lot of brains and hard work to cause the financial crash. Some people work ridiculously hard on nefarious activity. (I was told today about a team of thieves who spent months tunneling under a road and into a convenience store in order to steal an ATM that in the end held less than a thousand bucks in cash; I believe the cops worked out that they'd worked very hard in effect for less than 50 cents an hour. Morons.)
My original point was that it is most certainly possible for speculation to be unethical, even if some speculation is also clearly ethical. Blanket assertions of ethicality of a particular method are just too broad.
Slashdot Mirror
It's kind of hard for plain text and images to do bad things though I suppose it's been done before.
There have been vulnerabilities in PNG and JPG image format handlers in the past, so yes, there has definitely been the potential to have images do bad things. (Arguably none would be as bad as using some of the ones relating to goatse, but that's a different kind of problem.) If you hear of problems in fundamental media type handlers, for goodness sake make sure you're up to date with your security patches!
I don't know if there were any exploits of those problems in the wild though.
I have more than once been the one advocating for IE's removal and replacement with Firefox.
I've been using non-IE for years without feeling the lack, but if you depend on some awful ActiveX monstrosity for your business, I can see a lack of willingness to upgrade as being sensible. It's also a good reason for having a cry in the corner, but there you go.
MBAs are toxic in any position other than CEO. CPAs should run Finance divisions, engineers should run Engineering divisions, salesmen should run Marketing. MBAs should push mail carts, or mops, until they get it.
The problem isn't people with an MBA. The problem is that there are specialist MBAs; they only know being an MBA, an abstraction of being a manager. The people who have real experience (sales, finance, engineering, whatever) and also an MBA are usually OK as they know when the management theory is full of shit.
All theory isn't exactly correct in all details, that's what makes it theory. (OTOH, a theory also helps you stop getting bogged down in all the details, so it's still valuable to have. The theory/practice balance is an interesting dynamic.)
to find programmers who like contests.
or who like gaming contests.
For many image manipulators, other software like Pixelmator or Seashore/GIMP would provide enough control at a fraction of the price. It's missing some features like layer styles, but it has the basics, and comparing 'cloud' pricing to buying and owning software would make many people consider living with the lost features.
It may also encourage developers of those systems to work on adding the features (or equivalents) that are missing. Now I'm not saying it will for sure, or that it will be easy, but once the fundamental design work is done it is far easier to replicate; there's a model to test against, and a language for users to describe their requirements to developers in.
Won't work on it myself though; I hate image manipulation work (whether doing it by hand or using a program).
This may be a very rare thing indeed: The commerce clause being used as intended.
Congress also has got the power to levy taxes; the SCOTUS ruled on that recently, so don't expect any change there for quite a while. If Congress choses to introduce a national sales tax, challenging its legality would be really hard. (It would also encourage harmonization of in-state sales taxes, as vendors will prefer to have one tax rate if they can't have zero taxes, but that's by-the-by.)
I think you'll find that the jet engine was a "tremendous leap" over the Wright Flier...
There were a few other key step changes along the way, such as the switch away from using wing warping to create control surfaces, the first rotary engines, the first engines to use air compressors (which may have preceded jet engines; I'm not sure), and the first supersonic aircraft (which need radically different wing shapes). Scramjets are still an interesting addition to that line of key changes though.
You either "get" how to drive a hybrid, or you don't.
You not only have to "get" it, you also have to be willing to drive like that. Which knocks out another significant chunk of the population.
I'd say that "get"ting it includes having the willingness to act in a sane way. The silly thing is, provided you're willing to actually spend some thought trying to predict what other drivers are doing and observe what the environment is like, driving in a fuel-efficient way costs virtually no time. Maximizing your efficiency means braking as little as possible (bearing in mind that being in a collision is a critical loss of efficiency!) and accelerating gently. You also have to leave a bit larger gap between yourself and the vehicle in front so that you've got time to act if they do something odd.
The plus side of this is that it reduces the impact of braking waves in heavy traffic (you know, where some idiot at the front sees a cute squirrel or something and hits the brakes a little, causing the idiots behind to brake more heavily and sending a wave of stopped traffic backwards through the queue; they're a feature of heavy traffic, especially when most drivers are acting unintelligently).
Drive Smart! It's good for your blood pressure and your wallet!
the UK has republicans?
Yes. They're a variation of craziness, largely on the left of politics, that feels the most important thing is changing the way the head of state is selected. (You know, instead of getting the economy moving properly again, things like that.)
There's also the equivalent of US Republicans; they're called Conservatives, and they're feeling rather worried by a minor party called UKIP right now (who could be likened to the Tea Party I suppose, but they're not the same; the details of politics really vary a lot between countries, even if the smell emanating from it doesn't change nearly so much).
Unfortunately, the price we pay is very steep. If it my child were killed in a school shooting, I'm sure I'd feel differently.
Perhaps you should hand out "Martyr for Freedom! Sponsored by the NRA!" medals to all the parents who lose children in school shootings. I'm sure they'd feel much better after that.
You dont need a CNC mill. Let me guess, you think you need a supercomputer to write iphone apps? You can make a gun with rudimentary tools that are in many people's garages. How do you think gun smiths in the 1800's did things? You think they fired up their CNC mill and had their horse program the computer to start cutting?
To counterpoint: small gunsmiths in the 19th century didn't (usually) produce as high quality armaments as those you got from somewhere with a good set of machine tools.
FWIW, I think there are more interesting thing to do with computer-driven machine tools than make firearms; why make a gun when you can work on making a robot that can fetch you a beer and a packet of potato chips? Get your priorities right; overthrowing the government isn't likely to happen today, but getting thirsty is.
More relevantly though, this mechanism allows you to get summary data without the server knowing what those summary values are. That might or might not be important.
Damn, hit submit and thought of another point immediately! What I'm not sure of is whether you could hide what type of operation is being performed. Would the server be able to know you're calculating a maximum or an average, even if not what it is? My understanding of the details of homomorphic encryption is rather shaky so I can't be sure about that...
However, with homomorphic encryption we can hide even that!
Since I can evaluate any program homomorphically over my data, I write a program that says "return file number x" and give it an encrypted value, say 50, for x. The server now evaluates this program, with my encrypted 50, over the entire set of files. What he gives back to me is my file that I wanted, but from his point of view he can't actually tell which file he gave me! All he knows is he ran a circuit over all the files in the database, with my input that specifies which one I want, but he can't tell what my input is because it is encrypted.
You're overselling it. The server can still apply its own labeling (and probably will!) and perform traffic analysis over that; you're still providing a decision procedure even if an elaborate one. What he doesn't learn is what your labeling is, but since you could be using an arbitrary labeling in the first place that's not a huge step forward.
More relevantly though, this mechanism allows you to get summary data without the server knowing what those summary values are. That might or might not be important.
Point of order: there are proscriptive standards, backed up by laws of various kinds, but not so much in the area of online information systems. An example of a set of proscriptive standards is the definition of weights and measures; while many goods can be sold in any quantity, the vendor has to at least correctly describe the amount that is being sold.
By definition that means that Flash has a broken DRM implementation.
Stating the obvious, eh? (DRM is always formally broken. Providing the encrypted content and the code to decrypt it and the keys to use, and then not expecting it to get broken? Hah!)
And wait for the security issues which arise! In 5, 4, 3, 2, ...
As opposed to the ones in Flash and Silverlight and Java and ...? Now isn't the time to be closing that stable door. The horse has bolted. The stable has burnt down, the remnants bulldozed, and a chic little apartment block built instead.
The big problem is what it always was: writing a secure plugin is mind-bogglingly hard. (It's doubly hard when marketing wants "just another feature" all the time, as feature-sets aren't simply composeable without non-trivial consequences.) I'm just waiting for someone to figure out a fundamental problem in Javascript (or a major implementation of it), when all the securetards will run around screaming that the world is ending. It will happen, people make blunders all the time and their reactions are (almost) entirely predictable.
Root Mean Square. We're at least pretending to be engineers around here; we should know this straight off!
The time off is given for the 'family' not for medical recovery. The time off is so mom can be with her child, not because she is recovering. She isn't even taking care of the child for the most part during her 'recovery' period, its only after that when she starts doing her job.
A substantial part of the reason for extended time off is that, to start out with, babies need feeding during the night. Preferably with fresh breast milk. Mum spends her time being shattered, and is mostly not awake enough to be actively holding down a job as well. It's fairer on her colleagues for her to be off for at least a few months until daytime-only feeding is established. The time to do that depends on the child, but it is easier for her employer to give a bit more time off than strictly necessary so that a predictable stand-in can be used.
The only sane alternative is to just sack people for getting pregnant and carrying the child to term. That's deemed socially unacceptable by a majority of people on both the left and the right.
And by the way, nuclear is cheap. What makes it expensive is delays. Delays caused by endless lawsuits of people utterly afraid of nuclear power. And so we CAN'T build new nuclear power plants. Instead of taking 3-4 years, they take maybe 3 decades as construction is stopped by the courts until being given approval to proceed. At, say, 10% interest rate, over 25 or so years that increases the cost by /an order of magnitude/ over what it would be with a quick construction. That is 90% of the reason for the supposed high cost of new nuclear power. This is cited by opponents of nuclear power as reason for why we should oppose nuclear power, but that is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy because lawsuits and political opposition slow down new construction. Meanwhile, we're doubling and soon tripling the carbon dioxide levels.
This suggests that the real way forward is to use lawsuits to stop new coal, oil and gas plants! Fight fire with writs! Bwahahahahaa!
Sorry. Just had to let a quick evil laugh out there.
But blackberry and apple is an awesome combination in a pie.
It would seem that antimatter could only fall up, if there was some way to distinguish gravitational and inertial mass. From my experience of how electrons and positrons were accelerated at SLAC, their inertial mass was identical. The only difference between them was their charge.
This is why it is important to conduct the experiment to see if the gravitational and inertial mass of antimatter are the same. Sure, we know that they're the same thing for ordinary matter and that antimatter and matter have the same inertial mass, but the effect hasn't been properly studied for antimatter (because that's a furiously difficult experiment). It could be that gravitational and inertial mass are the same for AM; that would be the most likely expected case, and we wouldn't learn that much about new physics if that's true. But we haven't checked, and so we must do so to make sure. After all, if they were different that would be a really important fact about the universe that we are currently unaware of. (It would be far more important than finding the Higgs boson.)
Let the experiment be done. Let us find out if the universe is even stranger than we thought it was. It's this sort of thing that a fundamental physics lab should study.
Yeah, but a good "Oh shit! Look ahead of you!" is still better than having someone on the other end of a phone. The person calling has no idea what is going on at your end and cannot have such an idea. Well, not unless you're giving someone a running commentary or something, but that's really not the case we're worried about.
There's been enough experience with people having talkative passengers, using phones and texting while driving to actually ground it in statistics. Passengers are safer than calls, and texting is far more dangerous than both. (If you've got a passenger, let them take the call and do the texting; even safer still!)
Two of the three most popular desktop OS famillies (windows and linux) don't have proper provisions for resolution independent font and window sizes.
The problem is that they tend to mis-report the physical size of the viewable area of the displays, without which you can't work out the scaling factor. (The low-level font rendering engine wants pixel-based sizes for obvious reasons, though you might well not be normally working at that level.) However, a bigger problem in practice is that the non-text parts of windows are not designed with scaling in mind. The most obvious example of that is where someone uses absolute positions for all the components within a window — the window becomes impossible to even resize correctly, never mind scale! — but it certainly isn't the only issue in the area. Far too much GUI programming is done with special magic values for things like borders and inter-component spaces, even now.
Hard work and brains are also not necessarily unethical.
Nor are they necessarily ethical. After all, it took a lot of brains and hard work to cause the financial crash. Some people work ridiculously hard on nefarious activity. (I was told today about a team of thieves who spent months tunneling under a road and into a convenience store in order to steal an ATM that in the end held less than a thousand bucks in cash; I believe the cops worked out that they'd worked very hard in effect for less than 50 cents an hour. Morons.)
My original point was that it is most certainly possible for speculation to be unethical, even if some speculation is also clearly ethical. Blanket assertions of ethicality of a particular method are just too broad.
Speculation is not necessarily unethical.
FTFY.