Some of that does seem to fit, but I think it's a stretch in other areas. Documenting back to 1974, 1971, etc, in that detail on the spur of the moment is highly unlikely. If keeping records is that important then that information would have already been documented, and not jotted down randomly at a whim 30 years later. Those numbers (74, 71) likely have another meaning. The 3XORL fits with taking a med 3 times orally, but I'd think someone that into prescription meds would use actual medical terminology, like PO for oral. The whole thing about keeping it all secret seems a bit over the top to me. The part about bipolar people tending to be violent thus using codes to prevent evidence from being used against them in court is, well, rather far-fetched. I'm sure some do that, but he makes it sound like that's commonplace.
If this indeed is the meaning of the writing then it would be very easy for the FBI to verify by looking at his medical records.
I don't think this is a cipher for several reasons, among which is that it is too verbose and too repetitive. But I do think that poster is onto something, as this does look like a log or record of some kind. It might be drug related, which would make sense why he specifically mentioned taking something orally and trying to obfuscate what he's written. He might also be into collecting things, like baseball cards for example, and the "codes" represent things like team, player, year, card condition, etc. Obviously that could apply to many, many different kinds of collections as well (just threw baseball cards out off the top of my head). I find it hard to believe that, given the amount of additional information law enforcement must have, that they cannot correlate this code with these sorts of theories.
I'm posting this to clear my moderation. Clicked on the drop list, and immediately your comment was modded Flamebait when I was intending on Interesting. The drop box didn't even appear, and the page scrolled up as soon as I clicked it. Slashdot's new DHTML crap really irks me.
This is a ridiculous speculation by IDC. From this article:
IDC also hugely underestimated Android growth (again), predicting 24.6 percent market share by 2014. But Android already exceeded the projection in 2010 -- just months after IDC's forecast.
Seems like they're pulling numbers out of a hat to me.
OS X and Linux have different kernels, which means different I/O & process schedulers, different file systems, and a whole host of other implementation details that you'll write off as having been abstracted away until you have your first serious encounter with It Works On My Machine.
I can't imagine writing code so finicky and unstable that it can only be cajoled into running under such a specific environment. If those details are important, then the software should be developed specifically to handle various cases. They way he describes it, it's a bunch of voodoo that can't fully be understood, and whenever the product doesn't work they simply place blame on some nebulous external factor.
That show was one of the scariest things I encountered during my childhood. All of it. The creepy synth music, the topics, the writing, and most of all, Nimoy's narrating. Terrifying stuff for an 8 year old. Of course I ate it up.
Never has an operating system had so many challenges to its intellectual property in such a short time period as the Google operating system has had in the last year.
That's because an operating system never gained such popularity in such a short time period*. I expect if the number of patent lawsuits were charted against the number of users, we'd see that the ratio for Android would be normal (or less) compared to other operating systems. It's just that typically these things are spread out over several years, which is how long the OS takes to really become popular.
* Yeah, I just made that up off the top of my head.
When asked by the Australian parliamentary online safety committee how Facebook can detect those lying on age forms, Thompson replied, "It's not perfect." In fact, it's relatively easy. A standard online form asks a user if he or she is 13 or over, and the user can tell the truth or not. ComScore estimates about 3.6 million of kids under 12 use Facebook in the United States.
Uh, I don't understand this retarded article. How are they determining that users are under 13? The article says "In fact, it's relatively easy." but then goes on to talk about something entirely different. Of course the user can tell the truth or lie, but how is Facebook determining they lie? In their own words "It's not perfect" so what are they doing? Facial recognition to flag people that look young? Network of young friends? Use of improper grammar and slang in posts? I hate lame articles like this.
Exactly. At least with the current reactors engineers know exactly what happens when they are subjected to a massive earthquake and tsunami. They know what works and what doesn't. Existing reactors can be upgraded, protocols and operating procedures refined, etc, to avoid the problems that occurred in Japan.
Personally I think the weakness is regardless of the amount of redundancy and backup systems, they are all physically and geographically together. Thus whatever external event damaged the primary systems will likely damage the backup systems as well. I think the industry needs to standardize on modular power, pumping and control systems that can be flown in by helicopter to provide the bare minimum cooling capability to prevent melt down. These modules would be the size of shipping containers and stored in geographically diverse places from the actual reactors, but within a several hour hauling distance by truck, or a couple hours by helicopter.
People are freaking out because a nuclear power plant has released small amounts of harmful radiation and might release moderate amounts.
No, not people. The news media. Of everything going on in Japan this is what they are focusing on. I'm mildly disgusted at the news coverage all in all. The primary coverage initially was the effect on the stock market, and now it is nothing but these reactors. Far, far more environmental damage is being done by all matter of other noxious things burning and leaking. Oh, and I'm pretty sure people are dead, dying, entrapped, homeless, etc, already. Yet the focus is on what *might* happen with a nuclear reactor, as if the thing is going to go up like a thermonuclear bomb.
A couple months ago I came a across a "game" at the mall, and I immediately thought "A person with a portable high powered laser could steal every bit of stuff out of this". Anyway the game is similar to those claw games, where you move the claw with a joystick to pick up an item. This game differs in that expensive items like DSi, PSP, iPod, are dangling from strings. The player moves an arm with an (obviously inept) pair of scissors on it, which tries to cut through the string to drop the item. It must take many cuts to gradually cut through the string, because I could see where strings had been slightly damaged by the cutters, but still needed a lot more to cut all the way through.
Anyway, a person with one of these lasers could clean house. The case is clear glass all the way around, so I assume the laser would shine right through it.
Where do outfits like this get their cash? Did they really sell many copies of Limewire Pro? Their potential customer base is people that don't want to pay for music, so I wouldn't think they would be all that inclined to buy software either (especially when the free version works just fine).
I think another element is that tablets are primarily oriented at content consumption, which places them into the same category as standalone DVD players, MP3 players, handheld game consoles, etc. And within those categories, yes, a tablet is at least double the cost of other devices. At least with a notebook the possibility of productivity exists, whether or not it is always utilized in that manner.
As a comparison, you can purchase a rather nice and large LCD television with built-in internet connectivity such as Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, etc for the same price as a premium tablet. It would certainly seem that tablets should be in the realm of netbook pricing giving computing power, storage, display size, etc (especially when considering how much less mass and mechanical parts are involved with a tablet compared to a netbook).
Yes, but Amazon will no longer have a physical presence in the state, thus Texas will not be able to collect on any future sales tax. Texas needs to cut some sort of compromise deal with Amazon or they will lose out in the long run, but in lost revenue from jobs and physical infrastructure, as well as potential future sales tax.
See the problem is Amazon did not collect sales tax for Texas from those past sales, thus this money has to come out of their bottom line, instead of literally just taking money from the state population and giving it to the state government when sales tax is tacked on as normal.
That's funny, because I was reading the exact opposite today:
"This isn't just a case where Apple took a CDMA chip and slapped it into the iPhone and called it Verizon. They actually redesigned the entire logic board, including the electromagnetic shields," iFixit's M.J. explains in a video for the repair site. "Apple's RF engineering team did a great job at restructuring the antenna, so hopefully we don't have the same death-grip problem that saddled its AT&T brother."
First of all, I think the snide tone of the ITWorld article is annoying. It's actually kind of cool, there is a point to it, and as far as "litter" goes, one or two happy meals from McDonalds would contain as much paper and electronics and plastics as all those planes combined. Funny how ITWorld didn't even report if the recovered cads actually worked or not (most obviously they did, or ITWorld would have made fun of Samsung otherwise).
What I find interesting is that the planes dispersed so drastically - the distance from Russia to Australia is extremely impressive. I would've expected jet streams and weather systems and the like to have tended to keep the planes together, but I guess up that high things are calm they are free to go their own way for a very long way.
I've been doing a similar thing with my own domain / webserver for the last decade. I'll make up email addresses right on the spot, usually like "slashdot.org@mydomain.com" or "sprint@mydomain.com", etc. I have a catch all account that receives all emails to non-existent accounts, and I can split any of the addresses off into an actual account whenever needed (or disable it if it becomes inundated with spam). That was always one of the big perks of owning your own domain.
This looks like a good college or hobbiest project using a microcontroller to practice simple USB HID design. Would be a good Science Fair project too if dad helped. Hmmmmm....
You know, considering it can be done totally free, I wonder if there would be value in a studio creating a false rumor like this, then surveying the public response on social networks and sites like this in order to get a feel for the market / fanbase for potential sequel?
The article doesn't make it clear if he only wore that single pair of pants every single day, and if not, how often did he actually wear them? I don't think it is even possible for a pair of jeans to be worn 450 times without completely falling apart, so obviously he must have worn other clothes too.
Wow! Flash is Turing Complete! Who woulda thunk it? Now if only it could be implemented in Javascript so as to also be unusable within another interpreted / bytecode environment....
I haven't noticed a spike in email spam, but my blog (which gets like 20 hits a day) has been getting a lot of spam comments over the last several days. Probably not a coincidence.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of that does seem to fit, but I think it's a stretch in other areas. Documenting back to 1974, 1971, etc, in that detail on the spur of the moment is highly unlikely. If keeping records is that important then that information would have already been documented, and not jotted down randomly at a whim 30 years later. Those numbers (74, 71) likely have another meaning. The 3XORL fits with taking a med 3 times orally, but I'd think someone that into prescription meds would use actual medical terminology, like PO for oral.
The whole thing about keeping it all secret seems a bit over the top to me. The part about bipolar people tending to be violent thus using codes to prevent evidence from being used against them in court is, well, rather far-fetched. I'm sure some do that, but he makes it sound like that's commonplace.
If this indeed is the meaning of the writing then it would be very easy for the FBI to verify by looking at his medical records.
I don't think this is a cipher for several reasons, among which is that it is too verbose and too repetitive. But I do think that poster is onto something, as this does look like a log or record of some kind. It might be drug related, which would make sense why he specifically mentioned taking something orally and trying to obfuscate what he's written. He might also be into collecting things, like baseball cards for example, and the "codes" represent things like team, player, year, card condition, etc. Obviously that could apply to many, many different kinds of collections as well (just threw baseball cards out off the top of my head). I find it hard to believe that, given the amount of additional information law enforcement must have, that they cannot correlate this code with these sorts of theories.
I'm posting this to clear my moderation. Clicked on the drop list, and immediately your comment was modded Flamebait when I was intending on Interesting. The drop box didn't even appear, and the page scrolled up as soon as I clicked it. Slashdot's new DHTML crap really irks me.
This is a ridiculous speculation by IDC. From this article:
IDC also hugely underestimated Android growth (again), predicting 24.6 percent market share by 2014. But Android already exceeded the projection in 2010 -- just months after IDC's forecast.
Seems like they're pulling numbers out of a hat to me.
OS X and Linux have different kernels, which means different I/O & process schedulers, different file systems, and a whole host of other implementation details that you'll write off as having been abstracted away until you have your first serious encounter with It Works On My Machine.
I can't imagine writing code so finicky and unstable that it can only be cajoled into running under such a specific environment. If those details are important, then the software should be developed specifically to handle various cases. They way he describes it, it's a bunch of voodoo that can't fully be understood, and whenever the product doesn't work they simply place blame on some nebulous external factor.
That show was one of the scariest things I encountered during my childhood. All of it. The creepy synth music, the topics, the writing, and most of all, Nimoy's narrating. Terrifying stuff for an 8 year old. Of course I ate it up.
Never has an operating system had so many challenges to its intellectual property in such a short time period as the Google operating system has had in the last year.
That's because an operating system never gained such popularity in such a short time period*. I expect if the number of patent lawsuits were charted against the number of users, we'd see that the ratio for Android would be normal (or less) compared to other operating systems. It's just that typically these things are spread out over several years, which is how long the OS takes to really become popular.
* Yeah, I just made that up off the top of my head.
When asked by the Australian parliamentary online safety committee how Facebook can detect those lying on age forms, Thompson replied, "It's not perfect." In fact, it's relatively easy. A standard online form asks a user if he or she is 13 or over, and the user can tell the truth or not. ComScore estimates about 3.6 million of kids under 12 use Facebook in the United States.
Uh, I don't understand this retarded article. How are they determining that users are under 13? The article says "In fact, it's relatively easy." but then goes on to talk about something entirely different. Of course the user can tell the truth or lie, but how is Facebook determining they lie? In their own words "It's not perfect" so what are they doing? Facial recognition to flag people that look young? Network of young friends? Use of improper grammar and slang in posts? I hate lame articles like this.
George, it's good to see you on Slashdot! (sorry to ruin your pseudonym...)
Exactly. At least with the current reactors engineers know exactly what happens when they are subjected to a massive earthquake and tsunami. They know what works and what doesn't. Existing reactors can be upgraded, protocols and operating procedures refined, etc, to avoid the problems that occurred in Japan.
Personally I think the weakness is regardless of the amount of redundancy and backup systems, they are all physically and geographically together. Thus whatever external event damaged the primary systems will likely damage the backup systems as well. I think the industry needs to standardize on modular power, pumping and control systems that can be flown in by helicopter to provide the bare minimum cooling capability to prevent melt down. These modules would be the size of shipping containers and stored in geographically diverse places from the actual reactors, but within a several hour hauling distance by truck, or a couple hours by helicopter.
People are freaking out because a nuclear power plant has released small amounts of harmful radiation and might release moderate amounts.
No, not people. The news media. Of everything going on in Japan this is what they are focusing on. I'm mildly disgusted at the news coverage all in all. The primary coverage initially was the effect on the stock market, and now it is nothing but these reactors. Far, far more environmental damage is being done by all matter of other noxious things burning and leaking. Oh, and I'm pretty sure people are dead, dying, entrapped, homeless, etc, already. Yet the focus is on what *might* happen with a nuclear reactor, as if the thing is going to go up like a thermonuclear bomb.
A couple months ago I came a across a "game" at the mall, and I immediately thought "A person with a portable high powered laser could steal every bit of stuff out of this". Anyway the game is similar to those claw games, where you move the claw with a joystick to pick up an item. This game differs in that expensive items like DSi, PSP, iPod, are dangling from strings. The player moves an arm with an (obviously inept) pair of scissors on it, which tries to cut through the string to drop the item. It must take many cuts to gradually cut through the string, because I could see where strings had been slightly damaged by the cutters, but still needed a lot more to cut all the way through.
Anyway, a person with one of these lasers could clean house. The case is clear glass all the way around, so I assume the laser would shine right through it.
Sweet - of course Youtube to the rescue:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxeAi0v2DrI
Where do outfits like this get their cash? Did they really sell many copies of Limewire Pro? Their potential customer base is people that don't want to pay for music, so I wouldn't think they would be all that inclined to buy software either (especially when the free version works just fine).
I think another element is that tablets are primarily oriented at content consumption, which places them into the same category as standalone DVD players, MP3 players, handheld game consoles, etc. And within those categories, yes, a tablet is at least double the cost of other devices. At least with a notebook the possibility of productivity exists, whether or not it is always utilized in that manner.
As a comparison, you can purchase a rather nice and large LCD television with built-in internet connectivity such as Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, etc for the same price as a premium tablet. It would certainly seem that tablets should be in the realm of netbook pricing giving computing power, storage, display size, etc (especially when considering how much less mass and mechanical parts are involved with a tablet compared to a netbook).
Yes, but Amazon will no longer have a physical presence in the state, thus Texas will not be able to collect on any future sales tax. Texas needs to cut some sort of compromise deal with Amazon or they will lose out in the long run, but in lost revenue from jobs and physical infrastructure, as well as potential future sales tax.
See the problem is Amazon did not collect sales tax for Texas from those past sales, thus this money has to come out of their bottom line, instead of literally just taking money from the state population and giving it to the state government when sales tax is tacked on as normal.
That's funny, because I was reading the exact opposite today:
"This isn't just a case where Apple took a CDMA chip and slapped it into the iPhone and called it Verizon. They actually redesigned the entire logic board, including the electromagnetic shields," iFixit's M.J. explains in a video for the repair site. "Apple's RF engineering team did a great job at restructuring the antenna, so hopefully we don't have the same death-grip problem that saddled its AT&T brother."
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Verizon-iPhone-4-May-Offer-Hints-at-iPhone-5-iFixit-815631/
First of all, I think the snide tone of the ITWorld article is annoying. It's actually kind of cool, there is a point to it, and as far as "litter" goes, one or two happy meals from McDonalds would contain as much paper and electronics and plastics as all those planes combined. Funny how ITWorld didn't even report if the recovered cads actually worked or not (most obviously they did, or ITWorld would have made fun of Samsung otherwise).
What I find interesting is that the planes dispersed so drastically - the distance from Russia to Australia is extremely impressive. I would've expected jet streams and weather systems and the like to have tended to keep the planes together, but I guess up that high things are calm they are free to go their own way for a very long way.
I've been doing a similar thing with my own domain / webserver for the last decade. I'll make up email addresses right on the spot, usually like "slashdot.org@mydomain.com" or "sprint@mydomain.com", etc. I have a catch all account that receives all emails to non-existent accounts, and I can split any of the addresses off into an actual account whenever needed (or disable it if it becomes inundated with spam). That was always one of the big perks of owning your own domain.
Typically they are something far, far away and a long time ago. At least from our perspective that is.
The two main ways in which gaming will "save the world": solving obesity and world peace.
This looks like a good college or hobbiest project using a microcontroller to practice simple USB HID design. Would be a good Science Fair project too if dad helped. Hmmmmm....
You know, considering it can be done totally free, I wonder if there would be value in a studio creating a false rumor like this, then surveying the public response on social networks and sites like this in order to get a feel for the market / fanbase for potential sequel?
The article doesn't make it clear if he only wore that single pair of pants every single day, and if not, how often did he actually wear them? I don't think it is even possible for a pair of jeans to be worn 450 times without completely falling apart, so obviously he must have worn other clothes too.
Flamebait.
Wow! Flash is Turing Complete! Who woulda thunk it? Now if only it could be implemented in Javascript so as to also be unusable within another interpreted / bytecode environment....
I haven't noticed a spike in email spam, but my blog (which gets like 20 hits a day) has been getting a lot of spam comments over the last several days. Probably not a coincidence.