"does password masking do anything beyond preventing the casual shoulder-surfer?"
Erm...that is precisely ALL it has ever done?! What else do you think it does?
Back in the good ol days of Back Orifice and fast and wild rootkits and viruses there were a bunch of them that would take screen shots.
Most also did keylogging. So there were probably a few cases where unmasking a password put the user at worse risk, but throughout 99% of use over time, the casual shoulder surfer is the only real threat. (Hey, if you get infected, you got all sorts of problems and that little dot over your password isn't significant.)
All (most?) doctors [like me] are well aware that the expiry date for most drugs is notional rather than real. If I or my family get sick I use expired drugs that I have, or have scrounged from the pharmacy.
Not just doctors, the government as well. Our military stockpiles drugs and medication for emergencies, and keeps stuff for a minimum of ten years, often longer. They run extensive tests on it and it's still at 95-100% effectiveness after that time.
Yes, these results are public somewhere. (I forgot where I read them.)
There are a _few_ cases where something went wrong with some of them. And there were studies of public "drug went bad" stories in media. One woman did have kidney damage from Tetracycline (I think), exposed and stored in a damp environment. So even the cases where something happened, the situation was an outlier.
Older drugs are quite safe for the most part and it's hard to pin down reasons why they are not. There COULD be a small risk, but probably isn't. I still wouldn't store medications in a hot car, a pocket, purse, or backpack, or in a garage. But any house or office would be fine and low risk to use after the expiration date.
That's sort of a gamble, assuming that there will be the intense need for housing in the area in 20 years time. Sure, they'll be able to fill it with people, but will the market let them make the money back?
Sooo... unnamed sources say "might" and "could" and "maybe" and some person with a persecution complex (who's actually stomping on citizens right to free speech) complains that his multi-100's of billion merger might not work if someone else interferes... maybe?
WTF. This isn't fucking news. Call me when they actually DO something against the merger.
Turkey around 10,000 years ago:
Well Tiddles, I don't know about you but a lot of us have had enough of this abuse, kicking us when any little thing goes wrong, tormenting us for their sport, even murdering our poor children, so we're heading out to the desert until they've evolved a bit.
Egypt, thousands of years later:
As you all know, some members of the exploration committee went in to town - and let me tell you we were all a bit scared after those tales we heard as kittens - spent a few weeks cautiously interacting with the humans and trying to teach them our language, generally being friendly and helping to put food on the table and you know what? They treated us like gods.
The story stays the same - don't fuck over your admins and have proper procedure and backup.
Or alternatively -- don't trust admins, they can be stupid and / or assholes, and don't care about your business.
How do you "not trust" your admin?
You have to put a second admin there, who knows as much, and then trust THEM.
How do you trust the second admin? Maybe that person is the problem instead!
You could put a complicated system of checks and balances in place and reward following draconian rules and reward informing on someone who calls out incorrectness... But you still have to trust them.
The only practical way to increase the reliability of the meat based "admin system" is to keep the meat informed, happy, well paid and motivated to share the goals of the company.
Nobody's asked the question yet, so I, Anonymous Coward will.
What kind of natural phenomenon would cause a comet - an icy chunk of rock - emit radio waves at 1420MHz specifically and not at other frequencies?
1420MHz is where they were looking, based on an assumption about what ET would do to transmit. Multiply it by Pi or 2xPi and there is reasonably empty space on the spectrum. It's also meaningful because you'd be looking at that frequency to map stuff in the universe. So, if you want to be seen, you use it, or a non-culturally-centric meaningful frequency.
It is the "electron flip" frequency of hydrogen. So it only means there were hydrogen atoms or hydrogen gas there.
It could be done without static data with different types of numbers. (Not primes.) There are a couple of irrational numbers that go on forever after the decimal point (Pi being the best known) that don't fall into infinite repeating ever. The implication being that any given string of numbers of arbitrary length, no matter how long, exists in Pi. (I read a proof of this somewhere maybe here about two decades ago.)
There is math that can determine what any given decimal is even at points farther beyond where people have "calculated the value X number of digits for Pi". So, using these numbers, you assume you can find the data set you want on the compression end, decompression could be done by getting a list of sections of Pi decimals. "Start here, end there" Calculate what's in between.
Given some start points, and then a "what's different about this frame" type compression you would have a number of more or less fixed-size data sets.
The file would consist of say 1000 reference frames of the movie and then data sets that tell you where to look in Pi to get the rest.
The decoder can do a bunch of math and it takes Pi or other irrational numbers and finds the sections of decimals by calculating them, and then inserts the resulting data into the movie file.
You end up with a math-heavy decoder... and an absolute nightmare of a sorting job to match arbitrary and unknown places in the decimal list of Pi at the compression end.
Anyway, killing google's ads is easy. Killing the gratuitous anti-Trump propaganda mixed in with basically every google search (including a search for "Target"), not so much. I'd even settle for being able to turn off the "Top Stories" section that appears over most searches, which they seem to have coded in a filter-proof way (or I'm just a noob with custom filters). Someday I'll whip up a greasemonkey script to get rid of it, if nothing else.
Just switch to Bing, DuckDuckGo, or one of the others.
Google will straighten up or get replaced.
Sitting around wishing they will get better on their own is a fool's errand.
NAT isn't a firewall, but most consumer routers at this point do have a stateful firewall.
A NAT device will drop non-internally initiated connection attempts unless the user has opened up ports to the inside (not many do) and somehow messed it up.
For purposes of this particular discussion, a NAT device can be lumped in with "firewall".
According to Jim Corbet, 1930s Tiger hunter with a national park named after him (seriously -- he really understood wild tigers).
In his book Corbet warned any readers that wish take up the sport of hunting tigers on foot through thick jungle that tigers do not realize that humans cannot smell. So if you are walking downwind you will be safe from an attack from behind. However, walking upwind can be extremely dangerous if there is a man eater nearby.
Information that I am sure Slash Dot readers will find very useful.
Domestic felines seem to need to be reminded of human inabilities frequently. My cat gets stepped on in the dark about once a year, not realizing she can't be seen in the middle of the floor. Once it's done, she gets up and moves when humans walk in the dark.
The main difference I see between "smelling" and "incidental smelling" animals is a distinct two directions to nostrils so bi-directional smell can be done close to something that you don't necessarily want stirred up. (dust). Cold enough to "see breath" and dog and cat breath goes out the sides, not down the middle.
GDP numbers are fake. California's economy is really just two things, a massive real estate bubble and a massive tech bubble. Those do make GDP numbers look a lot bigger than they really are.
You forgot massive debt and looming infrastructure disaster problem. They also have two narrowly missed dam disasters going on right now. And more on deck.
Someone is messing with the columns and DIVs on slashdot and has completely messed it up. Account information box floating all over the fucking place (hey, morons, I know who I am, I don't need it giant size right there on the screen) covering up content
Then they fixed that by shoving the column over to the left taking up half the screen.
Two words for you morons: "Staging" "Environment"
Then, maybe some "testing"
But whatever, the content, submissions, editing, and comments are all crap now too so I suppose it fits.
HTML5 is one of the few efficient ways of making a web site ADA accessible. A "requirement" now because ambulance chasing lawyers are starting lawsuits to get settlements if the site is not.
And WHY THE FUCK is the account box floating fixed over half the FUCKIGN CONTENT here now? Hey, idiots at Slashdot, I KNOW WHAT MY ACCOUNT NAME IS I don't need the FUCKING BOX FLOATING over the content I came to read.
You know... I would buy a non-refundable ticket in certain cases, even at a higher price... if it meant I could guarantee no bumping for that particular flight.
For some flights I care about it, for others the freebies they offer in exchange for a 6 hour delay getting to my destination are worth it.
Two things can declog. First, you can run the filter backwards for a short time, water in motion can dislodge built up material far in excess of the water that flowed forward gathering that material. Second, for salts themselves clogging, you let natural entropy take care of it for you.
These filters are often tubes through which high pressure water is added, cleaned water enters the outer jacket area and falls off. Higher salinity water continues down the tube at high pressure and is discharged.
It's this higher salinity (but not solid salt) water that carries would would be solid salt off the filter for discharge.
These engineering "gotchas" the amateurs are coming up with here have already been taken care of a long time. Current desalination plants work don't they? What do you think they do in those? Wave a magic wand?
I don't see this doing well -- sure the landlords want it because it benefits them, but personally I would never use it. If an rental I was interested in was listed through this service I simply would look elsewhere and I think a lot of other people would as well. Landlords using this service would get fewer prospects and would either have to stop using the service or pressure the company to change the mechanics.
It won't go anywhere once word gets out about how much more expensive it is. The service might last several years but people will learn.
Then it'll end up like MySpace.
What is this service going to do if the landlord or renter just decide to stop paying them? Most municipalities aren't going to tolerate some California company telling them they have to evict a renter.
In a market where there are more renters, or renters with "burn and churn" tech jobs or whatever, this will inflate rental prices faster than they would have otherwise gone up.
On the other hand, when rental prices fall (say, the big insurance company moves) in an area, it has the reverse effect of causing rental prices to crash fast... which will be extremely bad for landlords... especially ones that haven't paid their properties off.
It will have an amplifying effect on the speed at which the market adjusts.
I would expect to see shorter and shorter leases go along with this.
As a renter with impeccable credit, good cash flow and no "renter issues" on my record it would be nice to be able to get a place based on what I offer the landlord (stability, no bullshit) rather than having to basically walk into a viewing ready to write a deposit check. Some of the landlords I talk to have lots of horror stories about tenants so it might be useful if there is some sort of quality rating as well as price.
It will also be interesting to see how this tool effects the "go visit the place" part of the location search.
Why would right-of-way matter when talking about connectivity for poor people? Poor people need cell phone towers, not lines to their apartments.
The poor people where I am, once they get below a certain level of income where having a car is a big problem, all tend to use a cell phone for internet and nothing else. Likewise they move around more often than those with higher income... take that to the extreme of the homeless guy that has a phone in hopes of getting a job. Cable right of way in his neighborhood is completely irrelevant.
If there is a program to help those people on the internet, there would be help to pay for data plans or upgrade the phone.
And disable speakerphone capability on all phones. Make hallways so narrow that people can't and won't congregate to monkey-jabber at each other. Make having a personal phone call on a cell phone in non-break areas or meeting rooms a fire-able offense.
Office spaces should be designed around what kind of work is done in them. There should be coding-only areas, and "sales people allowed" areas.
Isn't this what free apps like HiYa and TrueCaller do?
With apps like that, you're still getting the robocalls, you just don't see them. The carrier still has to carry them. They take up bandwidth on the trunks and frequency allocation on the cell towers. The ones that originate as VOIP sessions from some boiler room in Bangalore clog up valuable spectrum on transatlantic cables. The earlier in the process they can be blocked, the better.
Those are all still problems, you are right.
But, they are now the CARRIERS's problem, not mine.
It's their problem to fix anyway, so that's right where the pain should be to get the issues resolved.
That's stupid. I don't know the number someone might call me from during an emergency. I want all calls to come through, except for the ones made by jerks.
Both tools should be available.
Nobody depends on me. "Emergency" is not something anybody would call me for.
Others, with job, family, etc. may need to be available from a wide variety of places (i.e. some random school administrator)
Voicemail will be fine for any non-contact list communication for lots of people.
Really what needs to happen is a DNSSEC-like signature system between phone companies and the switches and the phone so that spoofed numbers are automatically blocked no matter what. Not that I do this, but there is far too much easy-to-break-into phone equipment out there still.
Slashdot Mirror
"does password masking do anything beyond preventing the casual shoulder-surfer?"
Erm...that is precisely ALL it has ever done?! What else do you think it does?
Back in the good ol days of Back Orifice and fast and wild rootkits and viruses there were a bunch of them that would take screen shots.
Most also did keylogging. So there were probably a few cases where unmasking a password put the user at worse risk, but throughout 99% of use over time, the casual shoulder surfer is the only real threat. (Hey, if you get infected, you got all sorts of problems and that little dot over your password isn't significant.)
There is always the little lead pills. The dispenser is a little noisy but seems to work just fine.
All (most?) doctors [like me] are well aware that the expiry date for most drugs is notional rather than real. If I or my family get sick I use expired drugs that I have, or have scrounged from the pharmacy.
Not just doctors, the government as well. Our military stockpiles drugs and medication for emergencies, and keeps stuff for a minimum of ten years, often longer. They run extensive tests on it and it's still at 95-100% effectiveness after that time.
Yes, these results are public somewhere. (I forgot where I read them.)
There are a _few_ cases where something went wrong with some of them. And there were studies of public "drug went bad" stories in media. One woman did have kidney damage from Tetracycline (I think), exposed and stored in a damp environment. So even the cases where something happened, the situation was an outlier.
Older drugs are quite safe for the most part and it's hard to pin down reasons why they are not. There COULD be a small risk, but probably isn't. I still wouldn't store medications in a hot car, a pocket, purse, or backpack, or in a garage. But any house or office would be fine and low risk to use after the expiration date.
That's sort of a gamble, assuming that there will be the intense need for housing in the area in 20 years time. Sure, they'll be able to fill it with people, but will the market let them make the money back?
Sooo... unnamed sources say "might" and "could" and "maybe" and some person with a persecution complex (who's actually stomping on citizens right to free speech) complains that his multi-100's of billion merger might not work if someone else interferes... maybe?
WTF. This isn't fucking news. Call me when they actually DO something against the merger.
Turkey around 10,000 years ago: Well Tiddles, I don't know about you but a lot of us have had enough of this abuse, kicking us when any little thing goes wrong, tormenting us for their sport, even murdering our poor children, so we're heading out to the desert until they've evolved a bit.
Egypt, thousands of years later: As you all know, some members of the exploration committee went in to town - and let me tell you we were all a bit scared after those tales we heard as kittens - spent a few weeks cautiously interacting with the humans and trying to teach them our language, generally being friendly and helping to put food on the table and you know what? They treated us like gods.
Austria, 1935: What am I doing in this box?
Simultaneously, Austria, 1935:
...
The story stays the same - don't fuck over your admins and have proper procedure and backup.
Or alternatively -- don't trust admins, they can be stupid and / or assholes, and don't care about your business.
How do you "not trust" your admin?
You have to put a second admin there, who knows as much, and then trust THEM.
How do you trust the second admin? Maybe that person is the problem instead!
You could put a complicated system of checks and balances in place and reward following draconian rules and reward informing on someone who calls out incorrectness... But you still have to trust them.
The only practical way to increase the reliability of the meat based "admin system" is to keep the meat informed, happy, well paid and motivated to share the goals of the company.
Nobody's asked the question yet, so I, Anonymous Coward will.
What kind of natural phenomenon would cause a comet - an icy chunk of rock - emit radio waves at 1420MHz specifically and not at other frequencies?
1420MHz is where they were looking, based on an assumption about what ET would do to transmit. Multiply it by Pi or 2xPi and there is reasonably empty space on the spectrum. It's also meaningful because you'd be looking at that frequency to map stuff in the universe. So, if you want to be seen, you use it, or a non-culturally-centric meaningful frequency.
It is the "electron flip" frequency of hydrogen. So it only means there were hydrogen atoms or hydrogen gas there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_line
It could be done without static data with different types of numbers. (Not primes.) There are a couple of irrational numbers that go on forever after the decimal point (Pi being the best known) that don't fall into infinite repeating ever. The implication being that any given string of numbers of arbitrary length, no matter how long, exists in Pi. (I read a proof of this somewhere maybe here about two decades ago.)
There is math that can determine what any given decimal is even at points farther beyond where people have "calculated the value X number of digits for Pi". So, using these numbers, you assume you can find the data set you want on the compression end, decompression could be done by getting a list of sections of Pi decimals. "Start here, end there" Calculate what's in between.
Given some start points, and then a "what's different about this frame" type compression you would have a number of more or less fixed-size data sets.
The file would consist of say 1000 reference frames of the movie and then data sets that tell you where to look in Pi to get the rest.
The decoder can do a bunch of math and it takes Pi or other irrational numbers and finds the sections of decimals by calculating them, and then inserts the resulting data into the movie file.
You end up with a math-heavy decoder... and an absolute nightmare of a sorting job to match arbitrary and unknown places in the decimal list of Pi at the compression end.
Lol.
Anyway, killing google's ads is easy. Killing the gratuitous anti-Trump propaganda mixed in with basically every google search (including a search for "Target"), not so much. I'd even settle for being able to turn off the "Top Stories" section that appears over most searches, which they seem to have coded in a filter-proof way (or I'm just a noob with custom filters). Someday I'll whip up a greasemonkey script to get rid of it, if nothing else.
Just switch to Bing, DuckDuckGo, or one of the others.
Google will straighten up or get replaced.
Sitting around wishing they will get better on their own is a fool's errand.
NAT isn't a firewall, but most consumer routers at this point do have a stateful firewall.
A NAT device will drop non-internally initiated connection attempts unless the user has opened up ports to the inside (not many do) and somehow messed it up.
For purposes of this particular discussion, a NAT device can be lumped in with "firewall".
According to Jim Corbet, 1930s Tiger hunter with a national park named after him (seriously -- he really understood wild tigers).
In his book Corbet warned any readers that wish take up the sport of hunting tigers on foot through thick jungle that tigers do not realize that humans cannot smell. So if you are walking downwind you will be safe from an attack from behind. However, walking upwind can be extremely dangerous if there is a man eater nearby.
Information that I am sure Slash Dot readers will find very useful.
Domestic felines seem to need to be reminded of human inabilities frequently. My cat gets stepped on in the dark about once a year, not realizing she can't be seen in the middle of the floor. Once it's done, she gets up and moves when humans walk in the dark.
The main difference I see between "smelling" and "incidental smelling" animals is a distinct two directions to nostrils so bi-directional smell can be done close to something that you don't necessarily want stirred up. (dust). Cold enough to "see breath" and dog and cat breath goes out the sides, not down the middle.
GDP numbers are fake. California's economy is really just two things, a massive real estate bubble and a massive tech bubble. Those do make GDP numbers look a lot bigger than they really are.
You forgot massive debt and looming infrastructure disaster problem. They also have two narrowly missed dam disasters going on right now. And more on deck.
Someone is messing with the columns and DIVs on slashdot and has completely messed it up. Account information box floating all over the fucking place (hey, morons, I know who I am, I don't need it giant size right there on the screen) covering up content
Then they fixed that by shoving the column over to the left taking up half the screen.
Two words for you morons: "Staging" "Environment"
Then, maybe some "testing"
But whatever, the content, submissions, editing, and comments are all crap now too so I suppose it fits.
HTML5 is one of the few efficient ways of making a web site ADA accessible. A "requirement" now because ambulance chasing lawyers are starting lawsuits to get settlements if the site is not.
And WHY THE FUCK is the account box floating fixed over half the FUCKIGN CONTENT here now? Hey, idiots at Slashdot, I KNOW WHAT MY ACCOUNT NAME IS I don't need the FUCKING BOX FLOATING over the content I came to read.
You know... I would buy a non-refundable ticket in certain cases, even at a higher price... if it meant I could guarantee no bumping for that particular flight.
For some flights I care about it, for others the freebies they offer in exchange for a 6 hour delay getting to my destination are worth it.
2. How do you clear clogging?
Review a diagram of a current desalination plant.
Two things can declog. First, you can run the filter backwards for a short time, water in motion can dislodge built up material far in excess of the water that flowed forward gathering that material. Second, for salts themselves clogging, you let natural entropy take care of it for you.
These filters are often tubes through which high pressure water is added, cleaned water enters the outer jacket area and falls off. Higher salinity water continues down the tube at high pressure and is discharged.
It's this higher salinity (but not solid salt) water that carries would would be solid salt off the filter for discharge.
These engineering "gotchas" the amateurs are coming up with here have already been taken care of a long time. Current desalination plants work don't they? What do you think they do in those? Wave a magic wand?
It's not the title, it's the overly convoluted 'logic' used in the summary and quote.
WTF, why not just "pollution reduction of nuke plants causes drop in frequency of low birth rates." ?
Or even, "Pollution causes low birth rates. This study shows clean nuclear plants help prevent them."
I don't see this doing well -- sure the landlords want it because it benefits them, but personally I would never use it. If an rental I was interested in was listed through this service I simply would look elsewhere and I think a lot of other people would as well. Landlords using this service would get fewer prospects and would either have to stop using the service or pressure the company to change the mechanics.
It won't go anywhere once word gets out about how much more expensive it is. The service might last several years but people will learn.
Then it'll end up like MySpace.
What is this service going to do if the landlord or renter just decide to stop paying them? Most municipalities aren't going to tolerate some California company telling them they have to evict a renter.
In a market where there are more renters, or renters with "burn and churn" tech jobs or whatever, this will inflate rental prices faster than they would have otherwise gone up.
On the other hand, when rental prices fall (say, the big insurance company moves) in an area, it has the reverse effect of causing rental prices to crash fast... which will be extremely bad for landlords... especially ones that haven't paid their properties off.
It will have an amplifying effect on the speed at which the market adjusts.
I would expect to see shorter and shorter leases go along with this.
As a renter with impeccable credit, good cash flow and no "renter issues" on my record it would be nice to be able to get a place based on what I offer the landlord (stability, no bullshit) rather than having to basically walk into a viewing ready to write a deposit check. Some of the landlords I talk to have lots of horror stories about tenants so it might be useful if there is some sort of quality rating as well as price.
It will also be interesting to see how this tool effects the "go visit the place" part of the location search.
Why would right-of-way matter when talking about connectivity for poor people? Poor people need cell phone towers, not lines to their apartments.
The poor people where I am, once they get below a certain level of income where having a car is a big problem, all tend to use a cell phone for internet and nothing else. Likewise they move around more often than those with higher income... take that to the extreme of the homeless guy that has a phone in hopes of getting a job. Cable right of way in his neighborhood is completely irrelevant.
If there is a program to help those people on the internet, there would be help to pay for data plans or upgrade the phone.
Or to stop the retarded ideas from repeatedly being floated to a long list of people. Get it out once, shoot it down once. Move on.
And disable speakerphone capability on all phones. Make hallways so narrow that people can't and won't congregate to monkey-jabber at each other. Make having a personal phone call on a cell phone in non-break areas or meeting rooms a fire-able offense.
Office spaces should be designed around what kind of work is done in them. There should be coding-only areas, and "sales people allowed" areas.
Isn't this what free apps like HiYa and TrueCaller do?
With apps like that, you're still getting the robocalls, you just don't see them. The carrier still has to carry them. They take up bandwidth on the trunks and frequency allocation on the cell towers. The ones that originate as VOIP sessions from some boiler room in Bangalore clog up valuable spectrum on transatlantic cables. The earlier in the process they can be blocked, the better.
Those are all still problems, you are right.
But, they are now the CARRIERS's problem, not mine.
It's their problem to fix anyway, so that's right where the pain should be to get the issues resolved.
That's stupid. I don't know the number someone might call me from during an emergency. I want all calls to come through, except for the ones made by jerks.
Both tools should be available.
Nobody depends on me. "Emergency" is not something anybody would call me for.
Others, with job, family, etc. may need to be available from a wide variety of places (i.e. some random school administrator)
Voicemail will be fine for any non-contact list communication for lots of people.
Really what needs to happen is a DNSSEC-like signature system between phone companies and the switches and the phone so that spoofed numbers are automatically blocked no matter what. Not that I do this, but there is far too much easy-to-break-into phone equipment out there still.