I mostly agree with you - I also feel there was some ulterior motive (hijacking / ransom / obtaining the hardware, etc). However, there are still very likely suicide scenarios that could explain the evidence.
Why do people stand on the edge of a bridge and contemplate for hours before killing themselves? Why do people do "suicide by cop"? Because not many people have the nerve to actively cause their own death. The pilot(s) could have disabled tracking and just kind of flown around for a while (upping the ante and the stakes - trying to get beyond some point-of-no-return), and passively commit suicide by simply sitting back and waiting for the plane to run out of fuel and thus crash. The reason they would have turned off the tracking devices is to prevent intervention of some kind (scrambling military jets to see why the plane was off course and not communicating, etc).
Then there is also the suicide martyr religious fanatic type situation, where the intention was to not just kill themselves, but take something else out in the process. Does anyone know if Israel was within range of the jet, or if the course deviation took it in that direction?
It slightly blows my mind that companies (airlines) would buy a piece of hardware that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, which is incredibly mobile and used to travel thousands of miles at a time, with a huge amount of liability (billions potentially), and not include any kind of built in, always-on, hard-wired tracking device. Especially in this day and age. We're just talking about pinging tiny little packets of positional data every few minutes.
Re:Silent MMS dropping is a deal breaker
on
Goodbye, Google Voice
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
MMS texts (and images) come through but only if sent from a Sprint phone. I was rather surprised one day when I received one - I assumed google finally added support for mms. It wasn't until after a lot of trial and error and sleuthing that I figured out it was only if the mms was from a sprint phone.
The article is correct - google voice should be alerting someone (sender or receiver) the message wasn't delivered, but my hunch is that Sprint is providing the connectivity for Google Voice and they just throw away 3rd party MMS messages as part of the contract in order to keep bandwidth down.
Re:I cant buy Pi day greeting cards.....
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 1
Surely there are cards out there that say "Thinking of you" that show a big slice of pie on the front.
The stolen passports likely have nothing to do with Freescale, but in regards to those passports, they've already determined that the two tickets purchased for those two identities where purchased at the same time - they have consecutive ticket numbers. Further, and oddly, the two had different final destinations.
A conceivable theory is that they were terrorists with explosives in their checked in baggage. The plan was for the explosives to detonate later than they did (but something caused one to detonate prematurely), thus taking down two flights and not just one. Further, they may have intended to disembark or not board those final flights while intending their luggage to continue on (perhaps they did a test run and found that luggage was not properly removed from the plane if a passenger did not board a connecting flight at the destination Chinese airport). There was a Chinese terrorist attack in the last couple weeks (the mass killings with knives) and this plane was carrying almost all Chinese citizens, and it was headed for China. If that speculation is correct, two planes would have been destroyed, doubling the amount of Chinese that were killed, and the destruction would have happened over China, thus potentially causing collateral damage.
It makes sense for him to keep them as bitcoins, especially given his personality and past experiences. It isn't real money until it's been converted into.... real money. Thus it can't be taxed at this point. There is no reason for him to try and cash out now when at least 50% of it would go to the government. It makes far more sense to only very gradually exchange a few bitcoins as needed for expenses as you go. Yes, the value of his bitcoins may depreciate significantly (which really hasn't been the case over the long term), but considering the option is to lose 50% immediately (and get scrutinized by the government, etc), it still makes more sense to hang onto them. Even if they devalue down to $1 each, he is still sitting on $800,000.
Committing to a 3rd party library is a lot like adopting a child. It's a long term commitment that's not easily broken, and you can't ever have a thorough understanding of what the relationship will be like ahead of time. I started a long post about the 3 main reasons for going with a 3rd party library, but decided to delete my long-winded rant. I'll just say that for the most part it comes down to saving time (and thus possibly money). You're rolling the dice and hoping at the end of the day (whenever that is - 5 years from now, 10 years from now?) simply utilizing a 3rd party library will have saved you time and money.
I think I have a hard time with commitment (as in platforms, OSs, and 3rd party libraries), and that's probably to do with the number of platforms I've been involved with over the years, and the number that are now dead and gone. If you are the type to embrace and commit (like "I love Microsoft and I love C# and I'm going to jump in with both feet and that will be my universe") then sure, go ahead and use as many 3rd party libraries as you can. If you hope to have any kind of future portability of your code (as in compiling versions for Windows, iOS, OSX, Android, Linux) then you are entirely at the mercy of those 3rd parry libraries and what they will or won't support down the road. I mainly write code for myself (my own products I market), thus I consider the code I write as an investment. That is why I primarily use C++, because it is the only language I can create native applications in for all the platforms I just named (and more), and also why I look for public domain code or libraries with licensing and source code availability so I will know my future using that library is assured (I can build for other platforms, even if that means doing some work porting the code a bit).
I know that's not really answering you question ("How can I know if I can trust a 3rd party library"), and is more an answer to the question "Should I be using 3rd party libraries in the first place?"
Re:Too Little, Too Late & MtGox
on
The New PHP
·
· Score: 2
Like making it more difficult syntactically prevents SQL injection attacks either: var sql="SELECT fname, lname from people where id='"+id+"'";
Same vulnerability in Javascript.
Re:Too Little, Too Late & MtGox
on
The New PHP
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I do a lot of coding in PHP, and there's a lot of things I don't like about it, but your particular dislikes don't make a lot of sense.
Why in 2014, do I have to decorate variables with '$'?
It's not like PHP was written in 1965 and thus there was some hardware (memory footprint, compilation speed, etc) reason variables are prefixed with a dollar sign. It was a design choice. That's so you can do this: $count=5; echo "The total is $count.";
And you can use the same variable syntax in your code as in strings that are automatically parsed.
Why is the assiciative array syntax take two characters that look a comparison operator?
It doesn't "look" like a comparison operator if you actually know what the operators are. <= and >= are comparison operators, and => is not a comparison operator in any language I've ever used. A single equal sign looks like a comparison operator too, and woe to the developer that doesn't have the universal C-like basic operators (used in dozens of modern languages) memorized backwards and forwards.
Why do I need == and ===?
For the same reason that Javascript and other scripting languages need it. Those languages do automatic type conversion, and sometimes you don't want that to occur. The alternative is manually casting things, which isn't very script-like at all, and having to explicitly deal with types is more like C than an "easy to use" scripting language. Thus there are two equality operators for the times you don't really want 0 to equal null to equal false. This one is even more ironic considering Javascript based node.js is your favorite server side platform, and thus you would also have to use both == and === operators in your preferred language anyway.
ANd vaiable confusion between $_GET, $_POST and $_COOKIE
I don't even know where to begin on this one. They are 3 entirely different things, with the most self-explanatory names I can think of. That's exactly as it should be. Look at $_REQUEST if it's too difficult to figure out which you should be using (and woe to your client if that's the case).
I picked up an (original) Mattel Football game at a yardsale last summer for 50 cents (and one of those baseball games with the removable wired controller for pitching to the other player, also for 50 cents). I forgot how much fun that game was. I still remembered the nuances of how to play.
Wow, why do I get the impression we shouldn't have restricted our questions to his music composition and instead asked him stuff about the meaning of life in general? LOL. He just seems to be very wise and down to earth.
By then, the PC was too far gone, because the heathens were actually building their own operating systems and programming languages! The horror! We might lose control of the demographics!
Wait a second. What operating system stole PCs away from Microsoft Windows? In order for what you say to make sense, Microsoft would have had to have lost control over PCs (which still hasn't happened) to Linux, and so in turn Microsoft decided to dominate Smartphones instead, which also has not happened. Smartphones actually caused the opposite. It wrested control away from Microsoft to an OS created by a competitor (iOS), and another OS that is open source (Linux / Android). Second, what programming languages? Most all serious software written for Windows is through Visual Studio (C++ and later C#), although to a very small extent (as in a tiny, tiny percentage of Windows Apps) Java applications. No other programming languages represent much more than a footnote in the millions of Windows applications.
In other words, it's exactly the opposite of what you said.
You can still part out a phone and make at least a hundred bucks off it. I'm sure they would continue to be stolen just for that amount of money alone.
The best solution that comes to mind is to create a small black hole in the center of the bus. If it is of sufficient mass it will draw in all the light gravitationally, thus preventing the cameras from capturing said light.
Back in the late 80s, computer music was written in 4 channel trackers (Amiga, I'm thinking of you), and you had to try and cram as much "music" into just 4 channels as possible. Now the sky's the limit. I'm curious which you like better. The old days, where hardware limitations were always in your face and you had to use clever tricks and a lot of thought to work around them and keep it all in a few kilobytes of space, or the way things are now, where you have an unlimited number of tracks and instruments available and you just blow out static audio tracks (aka mp3)?
There must be more to it. The owner must have held a grudge of some kind against this woman to have gone to the trouble. It says he sent "several certified letters" regarding the video. Just the cost of sending "several" certified letters alone would be more than the cost of the movie in 2005. Maybe back in the 80s, when commercial VHS tapes of movies cost $60+, it would have made a little more sense, but not in 2005. He had some personal reason to go after this woman.
Also, as someone else pointed out, the statute of limitations would apply here. South Carolina has one of the shortest statute of limitations I've ever seen. It's only 3 years for both written and oral contracts.
In games where human-like characters are necessary, the uncanny valley can be an even bigger problem
I disagree. The very fact that you have control over a character that you are watching is unnatural, and for me disconnects from "reality". That pretty much goes for anything else interactive as well. We know already know the actor in the game cannot be human because it behaves arbitrarily as commanded by the controls we are operating with our hand. Our brain can't be fooled by pure visuals, because we already have a far deeper realization of the truth (that it is not a real human) because it is interactive.
When it comes to movies we are total observers, and the uncanny valley kicks in when we recognize that something is intended to look perfectly human, but our incredibly acute perception in identifying humans isn't fooled.
We have now become so used to seeing CGI humans that it's more of a boolean flag when they are recognized as such - I simply have an awareness that what I'm seeing isn't an actual human. When that happens it is a distraction and reduces how immersed I am in the movie. I don't think of it as "spooky" or that I want to kill the fake human or something, but it is simply a realization - I get a glimpse of the man hiding behind the curtain pulling the strings. A perfect example: The big Matrix Reloaded fight scene. Some little switch in my brain kept going: Real. CGI. Real. CGI. Real. CGI. Kind of makes it hard to enjoy a movie.
Slashdot Mirror
I mostly agree with you - I also feel there was some ulterior motive (hijacking / ransom / obtaining the hardware, etc). However, there are still very likely suicide scenarios that could explain the evidence.
Why do people stand on the edge of a bridge and contemplate for hours before killing themselves? Why do people do "suicide by cop"? Because not many people have the nerve to actively cause their own death. The pilot(s) could have disabled tracking and just kind of flown around for a while (upping the ante and the stakes - trying to get beyond some point-of-no-return), and passively commit suicide by simply sitting back and waiting for the plane to run out of fuel and thus crash. The reason they would have turned off the tracking devices is to prevent intervention of some kind (scrambling military jets to see why the plane was off course and not communicating, etc).
Then there is also the suicide martyr religious fanatic type situation, where the intention was to not just kill themselves, but take something else out in the process. Does anyone know if Israel was within range of the jet, or if the course deviation took it in that direction?
It slightly blows my mind that companies (airlines) would buy a piece of hardware that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, which is incredibly mobile and used to travel thousands of miles at a time, with a huge amount of liability (billions potentially), and not include any kind of built in, always-on, hard-wired tracking device. Especially in this day and age. We're just talking about pinging tiny little packets of positional data every few minutes.
MMS texts (and images) come through but only if sent from a Sprint phone. I was rather surprised one day when I received one - I assumed google finally added support for mms. It wasn't until after a lot of trial and error and sleuthing that I figured out it was only if the mms was from a sprint phone.
The article is correct - google voice should be alerting someone (sender or receiver) the message wasn't delivered, but my hunch is that Sprint is providing the connectivity for Google Voice and they just throw away 3rd party MMS messages as part of the contract in order to keep bandwidth down.
Surely there are cards out there that say "Thinking of you" that show a big slice of pie on the front.
Does the algorithm need to detect asteroids before or after they impact the earth?
The stolen passports likely have nothing to do with Freescale, but in regards to those passports, they've already determined that the two tickets purchased for those two identities where purchased at the same time - they have consecutive ticket numbers. Further, and oddly, the two had different final destinations.
A conceivable theory is that they were terrorists with explosives in their checked in baggage. The plan was for the explosives to detonate later than they did (but something caused one to detonate prematurely), thus taking down two flights and not just one. Further, they may have intended to disembark or not board those final flights while intending their luggage to continue on (perhaps they did a test run and found that luggage was not properly removed from the plane if a passenger did not board a connecting flight at the destination Chinese airport). There was a Chinese terrorist attack in the last couple weeks (the mass killings with knives) and this plane was carrying almost all Chinese citizens, and it was headed for China. If that speculation is correct, two planes would have been destroyed, doubling the amount of Chinese that were killed, and the destruction would have happened over China, thus potentially causing collateral damage.
Take two genomic pills and call me in the morning. Sounds affordable.
VPN called. It wants its acronym back.
Getty Images will serve the image and advertisements in an embedded player
Fixed the summary for you.
It makes sense for him to keep them as bitcoins, especially given his personality and past experiences. It isn't real money until it's been converted into.... real money. Thus it can't be taxed at this point. There is no reason for him to try and cash out now when at least 50% of it would go to the government. It makes far more sense to only very gradually exchange a few bitcoins as needed for expenses as you go. Yes, the value of his bitcoins may depreciate significantly (which really hasn't been the case over the long term), but considering the option is to lose 50% immediately (and get scrutinized by the government, etc), it still makes more sense to hang onto them. Even if they devalue down to $1 each, he is still sitting on $800,000.
KHAAAAAAN!!!!
Yeah yeah. I have karma to burn.
Committing to a 3rd party library is a lot like adopting a child. It's a long term commitment that's not easily broken, and you can't ever have a thorough understanding of what the relationship will be like ahead of time. I started a long post about the 3 main reasons for going with a 3rd party library, but decided to delete my long-winded rant. I'll just say that for the most part it comes down to saving time (and thus possibly money). You're rolling the dice and hoping at the end of the day (whenever that is - 5 years from now, 10 years from now?) simply utilizing a 3rd party library will have saved you time and money.
I think I have a hard time with commitment (as in platforms, OSs, and 3rd party libraries), and that's probably to do with the number of platforms I've been involved with over the years, and the number that are now dead and gone. If you are the type to embrace and commit (like "I love Microsoft and I love C# and I'm going to jump in with both feet and that will be my universe") then sure, go ahead and use as many 3rd party libraries as you can. If you hope to have any kind of future portability of your code (as in compiling versions for Windows, iOS, OSX, Android, Linux) then you are entirely at the mercy of those 3rd parry libraries and what they will or won't support down the road. I mainly write code for myself (my own products I market), thus I consider the code I write as an investment. That is why I primarily use C++, because it is the only language I can create native applications in for all the platforms I just named (and more), and also why I look for public domain code or libraries with licensing and source code availability so I will know my future using that library is assured (I can build for other platforms, even if that means doing some work porting the code a bit).
I know that's not really answering you question ("How can I know if I can trust a 3rd party library"), and is more an answer to the question "Should I be using 3rd party libraries in the first place?"
research based on them is probably still valid
That's probably reassuring.
Like making it more difficult syntactically prevents SQL injection attacks either:
var sql="SELECT fname, lname from people where id='"+id+"'";
Same vulnerability in Javascript.
I do a lot of coding in PHP, and there's a lot of things I don't like about it, but your particular dislikes don't make a lot of sense.
Why in 2014, do I have to decorate variables with '$'?
It's not like PHP was written in 1965 and thus there was some hardware (memory footprint, compilation speed, etc) reason variables are prefixed with a dollar sign. It was a design choice. That's so you can do this:
$count=5;
echo "The total is $count.";
And you can use the same variable syntax in your code as in strings that are automatically parsed.
Why is the assiciative array syntax take two characters that look a comparison operator?
It doesn't "look" like a comparison operator if you actually know what the operators are. <= and >= are comparison operators, and => is not a comparison operator in any language I've ever used. A single equal sign looks like a comparison operator too, and woe to the developer that doesn't have the universal C-like basic operators (used in dozens of modern languages) memorized backwards and forwards.
Why do I need == and ===?
For the same reason that Javascript and other scripting languages need it. Those languages do automatic type conversion, and sometimes you don't want that to occur. The alternative is manually casting things, which isn't very script-like at all, and having to explicitly deal with types is more like C than an "easy to use" scripting language. Thus there are two equality operators for the times you don't really want 0 to equal null to equal false.
This one is even more ironic considering Javascript based node.js is your favorite server side platform, and thus you would also have to use both == and === operators in your preferred language anyway.
ANd vaiable confusion between $_GET, $_POST and $_COOKIE
I don't even know where to begin on this one. They are 3 entirely different things, with the most self-explanatory names I can think of. That's exactly as it should be. Look at $_REQUEST if it's too difficult to figure out which you should be using (and woe to your client if that's the case).
I picked up an (original) Mattel Football game at a yardsale last summer for 50 cents (and one of those baseball games with the removable wired controller for pitching to the other player, also for 50 cents). I forgot how much fun that game was. I still remembered the nuances of how to play.
Wow, why do I get the impression we shouldn't have restricted our questions to his music composition and instead asked him stuff about the meaning of life in general? LOL. He just seems to be very wise and down to earth.
Thanks for taking the time to answer!
By then, the PC was too far gone, because the heathens were actually building their own operating systems and programming languages! The horror! We might lose control of the demographics!
Wait a second. What operating system stole PCs away from Microsoft Windows? In order for what you say to make sense, Microsoft would have had to have lost control over PCs (which still hasn't happened) to Linux, and so in turn Microsoft decided to dominate Smartphones instead, which also has not happened. Smartphones actually caused the opposite. It wrested control away from Microsoft to an OS created by a competitor (iOS), and another OS that is open source (Linux / Android). Second, what programming languages? Most all serious software written for Windows is through Visual Studio (C++ and later C#), although to a very small extent (as in a tiny, tiny percentage of Windows Apps) Java applications. No other programming languages represent much more than a footnote in the millions of Windows applications.
In other words, it's exactly the opposite of what you said.
You can still part out a phone and make at least a hundred bucks off it. I'm sure they would continue to be stolen just for that amount of money alone.
The best solution that comes to mind is to create a small black hole in the center of the bus. If it is of sufficient mass it will draw in all the light gravitationally, thus preventing the cameras from capturing said light.
That's nothing. Just wait until the ICF hits (internal combustion flu). Tesla will be laughing all the way to the bank.
Back in the late 80s, computer music was written in 4 channel trackers (Amiga, I'm thinking of you), and you had to try and cram as much "music" into just 4 channels as possible. Now the sky's the limit. I'm curious which you like better. The old days, where hardware limitations were always in your face and you had to use clever tricks and a lot of thought to work around them and keep it all in a few kilobytes of space, or the way things are now, where you have an unlimited number of tracks and instruments available and you just blow out static audio tracks (aka mp3)?
There must be more to it. The owner must have held a grudge of some kind against this woman to have gone to the trouble. It says he sent "several certified letters" regarding the video. Just the cost of sending "several" certified letters alone would be more than the cost of the movie in 2005. Maybe back in the 80s, when commercial VHS tapes of movies cost $60+, it would have made a little more sense, but not in 2005. He had some personal reason to go after this woman.
Also, as someone else pointed out, the statute of limitations would apply here. South Carolina has one of the shortest statute of limitations I've ever seen. It's only 3 years for both written and oral contracts.
In games where human-like characters are necessary, the uncanny valley can be an even bigger problem
I disagree. The very fact that you have control over a character that you are watching is unnatural, and for me disconnects from "reality". That pretty much goes for anything else interactive as well. We know already know the actor in the game cannot be human because it behaves arbitrarily as commanded by the controls we are operating with our hand. Our brain can't be fooled by pure visuals, because we already have a far deeper realization of the truth (that it is not a real human) because it is interactive.
When it comes to movies we are total observers, and the uncanny valley kicks in when we recognize that something is intended to look perfectly human, but our incredibly acute perception in identifying humans isn't fooled.
We have now become so used to seeing CGI humans that it's more of a boolean flag when they are recognized as such - I simply have an awareness that what I'm seeing isn't an actual human. When that happens it is a distraction and reduces how immersed I am in the movie. I don't think of it as "spooky" or that I want to kill the fake human or something, but it is simply a realization - I get a glimpse of the man hiding behind the curtain pulling the strings. A perfect example: The big Matrix Reloaded fight scene. Some little switch in my brain kept going: Real. CGI. Real. CGI. Real. CGI. Kind of makes it hard to enjoy a movie.
Or how about:
3. The rest of us really don't want to know any details about your reproductive anatomy.