As the article says, the FBI keeps copies of all illegal images they come across, which is probably practically all-encompassing. They can then prosecute for possession of most of those images because they are documented as too old to be a high-quality CGI, or because they flat out know the exact sources of those images.
The issue here is that prosecutors are using the typical shotgun approach, and firing a bunch of charges at her to see what will stick.
Technology has nothing to do with this crime, and there could be negative ramifications if she is indeed found guilty of federal communication charges for a local crime.
Let's pretend this occurred 30 years ago, and instead of using the internet as the backdrop, the woman and girl simply exchanged letters as local pen-pals. The woman would photocopy the girl's letters, and circulate them around the community, demeaning and belittling the girl. The girl finally finds out, and commits suicide over the humiliation and emotional distress.
So what's the difference here? Society at large demands punishment for this woman, as she acted intentionally to harm the girl emotionally and humiliate her publicly. Whether she did so using sign language, morse code, hand written letters or the internet is irrelevant.
The article sucked. Are the turbines really powering the town, or is that going into the grid in general? The article mentions that the power won't be free, but that the mayor hopes it will cost less because of lower transmission fees. So how much does it cost? The article mentions the landowner that set the thing up. So is it privately owned, or part of the city? Does the city actually buy electricity from this guy, or does he just make money selling to the power companies? What the heck does John Deere have to do with anything?
I think $188 million is a little extreme for a submarine cable network. Perhaps the Navy is having a hard time recruiting these days, and they are using cable TV as a perk for submariners. I still think the money could be better spent elsewhere - like for a mini-arcade in each sub.
The wheelchair industry would be a $10 trillion dollar a year industry if people didn't have legs. But since people are indeed born with legs, it is a moot point.
It would be one thing if vertical resolution was sacrificed in order to change the display ratio, but that is not the case - extra horizontal resolution has been added. So I don't see why someone is crying that their display has extra pixels to the side.
If vertical resolution is so terribly important, rotate your display 90 degrees, set your laptop on its side and use an external mouse and keyboard.
Finally, I use IDEs all the time, and the extra horizontal resolution is worth its weight in gold. Gone are the days when interactive debugging meant the source code window had to be cropped down to nothing, because I needed variable watches, function stacks, class trees, a console and memory windows open all at once. Now all that is lined up the right side of the display, and I still have my normal editing layout to the left. The same has been true for pretty much anything I do - video editing with Premiere Pro CS3, photo manipulation with PSP, composing music with a sequencer (extra horizontal resolution is optimal for this), etc.
"The way the black hole could turn into a quasar is for the galaxy to collide with another galaxy."
That's not what the article says: It's not understood what is causing the black holes to become newly active, because in most cases there is no evidence of collisions or mergers.
I agree. Also, where does HD DVD fit into that figure? I remember reading that HD DVD was selling like mad after Toshiba conceded defeat, so if 20% is Blu-Ray and 80% is DVD, where are the HD DVD sales?
I think they are spinning it: DVD and BD currently account for about 80% and 20%, respectively, of global demand for movie discs
So this isn't sales, it is demand. What is demand and how do you quantify it? Through a survey? Through a market expert? Are people really demanding Blu-ray, or do they merely want HD and Sony is conveniently using the Blu-ray trademark to represent all HD content in all forms? Just because 20% of people want higher resolution than DVD doesn't mean they will pay for it. Heck, I demand even better resolution than Blu-Ray, but that doesn't mean I will actually pay money for it. Do the people that demand and seek only HD movie torrents count in that 20% too?
Sure. I'm getting them to write their own software too, but the learning curve is a little steep. We would like to have them fabricating their own chipsets by 2010. Of course we'll have them start with FPGAs first before actual silicon, because that only makes sense.
I find it ironic that the CEO makes a grossly inaccurate statement that actually hurts his cause:
Compare this to the mobile phone that you keep in your pocket, which is typically three to ten times this power level. When it's at it's highest power level, you hold it next to your head to conduct a conversation. Ever notice that your skin gets warm after a long call? That's the only side effect of RF energy - warming.
The warmth of a cell phone has nothing to do with RF. It is waste heat generated directly by the transmitter - it is not the result of RF energy being absorbed by the skin and converted to heat. Even low-frequency transmitters get very hot when transmitting. VHF and UHF mobile rigs, like those used by emergency services and amateur radio operators, have huge (relative to the size of the radio) heatsinks on the back to dissipate the heat so the final stage electronics are not fried. My amateur handheld (Yaesu VX-7R quad band) can transmit at 5 watts, and the magnesium case literally gets so hot at that output power that it is difficult to hold. That is transmitting at frequencies vastly lower than cell-phones (144-148 MHz) which pass right through skin. It's not the antenna that gets hot, or my head, it is the case housing the transmitter.
Also, batteries get warm when generating high amperage, especially really compact batteries like lithium-ion. So that also contributes to the warmth of a transmitting cell phone.
Such high operating temperatures would not be acceptable for domestic use - the risk of fire would simply be too great. But commercial use, specifically for streetlights as the summary mentions, would be ideal. The amount of power consumed by streetlights world-wide must be staggering, so any improvement in efficiency, even in just this single area of light generation, would be substantial.
I don't know how many of you have seen a newborn calf, but its gait and motion when it jumped (at 3:02 in the video) looked exactly like that of a very young calf.
The title (which appears to be the only part the submitter actually "authored") is incorrect and conflicts with the text it quotes. An estimated 200,000 pages (most likely individual posts in phpBB forums) are out there, not sites.
According to this video, the pages are being inserted via SQL injection attacks. The 200k pages is based on a google search (he does not reveal what criteria he is searching for) which came back with 150k hits. So it is not clear how many actual sites are compromised. One could assume that once a phpBB site is compromised, every page of every thread, which is analogous to individual web pages, would redirect to the worm download site. A popular forum could easily have several thousand thread-pages. In fact, every single page would probably be redirecting, which would include each user's summary page (which would be in the thousands for even a small site). So a small number of cites could be accounting for all the 200k pages.
Also, in the video it is clear from the url that it is a phpBB2 site that is compromised. phpBB is currently at a major version of 3.
Does anyone else have a habit at looking at pictures and trying to see how they've been manipulated? These types of pictures are rampant in advertising. Pick up any magazine and start looking, and the poorly edited pictures will jump out quickly. The more professionally edited pictures have much more subtle problems, and can take a bit of poring over to find. Many product images (on packaging and in catalogs) are the same way, and are usually the worst edited of the bunch. Some things I look for:
An object rubber-stamped in multiple places. Each copy is identical, which gives it away. They are often scaled, rotated or mirrored to make them look more unique.
Lighting and shadows, which is what the algorithm in this story deals with specifically.
Focus. Often multiple objects will be in focus at varying distances impossible with a single shot.
The same image of a person is used in multiple shots. This is most prevalent in product images in catalogs.
Poor masking, where edges of objects are over or under processed, either clipping part of the object (hair can be particularly tough to do), or showing some color edges from the original background.
Anyway, that's just the geek in me I guess, because I really do enjoy finding flaws in images. What I hate is an image that has a sort of surreal perfection to it that I know must be composited, but I can't find any smoking gun.
I don't know about that. Imagine all of the digital pictures taken that never travel outside the home user's computer, memory card or CDs. Even more important, consider the amount of digital video data generated by home users with their camcorders. A single 60 minute Mini-DV tape is in the neighborhood of 15 GB. That's one single tape, and my family alone has dozens of them just from a single year. Even if those videos are uploaded to the internet, they must first be converted to some other format that has a vastly lower bitrate. So the original gigabytes of data still never touches corporate infrastructure - only the small, crappy quality encodings that end up on YouTube. They might also be counting swap files and hibernate files. In the case of hibernate files, a computer with 2 GB RAM generates 2 GB of data every time it hibernates.
A couple years ago when we moved into our current house we signed up for DSL. Things were good for a couple months, then connectivity became very poor and spotty. Throughput was bad, and the line would completely drop from time to time. We had 6 different tech guys come to our house. Each would hook up his diagnostic machine, which would sync up with the office and show really good connectivity and throughput. They swapped out our modem at least 4 times. They said that since the meter showed the line was good, the problem was mine. One guy started screwing around with my computers before I finally told him to stop (throughput was fine on my LAN). Finally, this one guy came out, and he was determined to get to the bottom of it. He at least had the intelligence to say that just because his equipment told him everything was fine, the fact that a modem couldn't sync meant otherwise. He ran a new line from the pole to the house. Then he helped run a new line all the way to my office (even though they're supposed to charge for that). He had a guy at the office switch the node we physically connected into. Still bad connectivity. So he then went from pole to pole from my house to the office, which is at least a dozen blocks. He finally found a splice that was connected with old-style crimp on connectors. Apparently there was some corrosion in them, which increased the resistance just exactly enough that the modem couldn't tolerate it, but the diagnostic equipment could (and the resistance was within tolerable limits). He replaced the splice, and everything has been perfect for well over a year. He gave me his own cell number and told me to call him direct if we ever had further problems.
So my point is not to jump to conclusions. There could be a physical problem with your line that happened about when the FiOS was rolling out. Try hooking your modem directly to your Network Interface Box (usually on the side of the house) with all of your interior wiring disconnected (should just be a little jumper going into a regular phone jack - unplug it and plug your modem straight in). If your throughput goes up, you have a problem with your interior wiring. If it doesn't, the DSL provider is obligated to fix the problem. Make sure you tell them that you hooked your modem up directly to the network interface box, because the tech person should then immediately schedule someone to come out instead of having you try bridging your DSL modem and a bunch of other worthless garbage. They will still probably tell you to hard-reset your modem, but after that then they should send someone out. As in my case, it might take several different techs to find someone that can actually help. Same with support on the phone. Some people would randomly pick things out of some list a computer showed them, and ask me to follow various worthless steps. Other people knew exactly what was not wrong, based on what I told them up front, and so they didn't beat around the bush.
Quite right, and this is actually the preferred scenario. If you are developing in an environment that performs more poorly than the production environment, then you won't be in for an unpleasant little surprise when your app hits the real world.
Perhaps this is true of new players, for whom the change of POV and death animation is new and thus entertaining. For someone used to the game, dying means losing, and most people don't play to lose, thus it doesn't make sense that they would find that enjoyable. When I play FPS games, the period after dying is often spent beating on my keyboard until I respawn, not enjoying an animation sequence I've seen plenty of times before.
Slashdot Mirror
As the article says, the FBI keeps copies of all illegal images they come across, which is probably practically all-encompassing. They can then prosecute for possession of most of those images because they are documented as too old to be a high-quality CGI, or because they flat out know the exact sources of those images.
I'm going to take some pictures of my 4 GB MicroSD card, so the Slashdot editors can be awed by it too.
That's pretty amazing, especially considering the video is less than 15 seconds long.
If I see the word "wiki" one more time I'm going to hurl.
The issue here is that prosecutors are using the typical shotgun approach, and firing a bunch of charges at her to see what will stick.
Technology has nothing to do with this crime, and there could be negative ramifications if she is indeed found guilty of federal communication charges for a local crime.
Let's pretend this occurred 30 years ago, and instead of using the internet as the backdrop, the woman and girl simply exchanged letters as local pen-pals. The woman would photocopy the girl's letters, and circulate them around the community, demeaning and belittling the girl. The girl finally finds out, and commits suicide over the humiliation and emotional distress.
So what's the difference here? Society at large demands punishment for this woman, as she acted intentionally to harm the girl emotionally and humiliate her publicly. Whether she did so using sign language, morse code, hand written letters or the internet is irrelevant.
The article sucked. Are the turbines really powering the town, or is that going into the grid in general? The article mentions that the power won't be free, but that the mayor hopes it will cost less because of lower transmission fees. So how much does it cost? The article mentions the landowner that set the thing up. So is it privately owned, or part of the city? Does the city actually buy electricity from this guy, or does he just make money selling to the power companies? What the heck does John Deere have to do with anything?
I think $188 million is a little extreme for a submarine cable network. Perhaps the Navy is having a hard time recruiting these days, and they are using cable TV as a perk for submariners. I still think the money could be better spent elsewhere - like for a mini-arcade in each sub.
The wheelchair industry would be a $10 trillion dollar a year industry if people didn't have legs. But since people are indeed born with legs, it is a moot point.
It would be one thing if vertical resolution was sacrificed in order to change the display ratio, but that is not the case - extra horizontal resolution has been added. So I don't see why someone is crying that their display has extra pixels to the side.
If vertical resolution is so terribly important, rotate your display 90 degrees, set your laptop on its side and use an external mouse and keyboard.
Finally, I use IDEs all the time, and the extra horizontal resolution is worth its weight in gold. Gone are the days when interactive debugging meant the source code window had to be cropped down to nothing, because I needed variable watches, function stacks, class trees, a console and memory windows open all at once. Now all that is lined up the right side of the display, and I still have my normal editing layout to the left. The same has been true for pretty much anything I do - video editing with Premiere Pro CS3, photo manipulation with PSP, composing music with a sequencer (extra horizontal resolution is optimal for this), etc.
Good idea. My prediction is that you will not receive spam for exactly one week.
"The way the black hole could turn into a quasar is for the galaxy to collide with another galaxy."
That's not what the article says:
It's not understood what is causing the black holes to become newly active, because in most cases there is no evidence of collisions or mergers.
A slashdot post citing references?
You, my friend, are way out of line.
But they say many schools requested the drives be left out to prevent students from playing unauthorized games.'
That's a good thing since games can't be distributed on USB drives, SD cards or downloaded from the internet.
I agree. Also, where does HD DVD fit into that figure? I remember reading that HD DVD was selling like mad after Toshiba conceded defeat, so if 20% is Blu-Ray and 80% is DVD, where are the HD DVD sales?
I think they are spinning it:
DVD and BD currently account for about 80% and 20%, respectively, of global demand for movie discs
So this isn't sales, it is demand. What is demand and how do you quantify it? Through a survey? Through a market expert? Are people really demanding Blu-ray, or do they merely want HD and Sony is conveniently using the Blu-ray trademark to represent all HD content in all forms? Just because 20% of people want higher resolution than DVD doesn't mean they will pay for it. Heck, I demand even better resolution than Blu-Ray, but that doesn't mean I will actually pay money for it. Do the people that demand and seek only HD movie torrents count in that 20% too?
Sure. I'm getting them to write their own software too, but the learning curve is a little steep. We would like to have them fabricating their own chipsets by 2010. Of course we'll have them start with FPGAs first before actual silicon, because that only makes sense.
I find it ironic that the CEO makes a grossly inaccurate statement that actually hurts his cause:
Compare this to the mobile phone that you keep in your pocket, which is typically three to ten times this power level. When it's at it's highest power level, you hold it next to your head to conduct a conversation. Ever notice that your skin gets warm after a long call? That's the only side effect of RF energy - warming.
The warmth of a cell phone has nothing to do with RF. It is waste heat generated directly by the transmitter - it is not the result of RF energy being absorbed by the skin and converted to heat. Even low-frequency transmitters get very hot when transmitting. VHF and UHF mobile rigs, like those used by emergency services and amateur radio operators, have huge (relative to the size of the radio) heatsinks on the back to dissipate the heat so the final stage electronics are not fried. My amateur handheld (Yaesu VX-7R quad band) can transmit at 5 watts, and the magnesium case literally gets so hot at that output power that it is difficult to hold. That is transmitting at frequencies vastly lower than cell-phones (144-148 MHz) which pass right through skin. It's not the antenna that gets hot, or my head, it is the case housing the transmitter.
Also, batteries get warm when generating high amperage, especially really compact batteries like lithium-ion. So that also contributes to the warmth of a transmitting cell phone.
Such high operating temperatures would not be acceptable for domestic use - the risk of fire would simply be too great. But commercial use, specifically for streetlights as the summary mentions, would be ideal. The amount of power consumed by streetlights world-wide must be staggering, so any improvement in efficiency, even in just this single area of light generation, would be substantial.
I don't know how many of you have seen a newborn calf, but its gait and motion when it jumped (at 3:02 in the video) looked exactly like that of a very young calf.
The title (which appears to be the only part the submitter actually "authored") is incorrect and conflicts with the text it quotes. An estimated 200,000 pages (most likely individual posts in phpBB forums) are out there, not sites.
According to this video, the pages are being inserted via SQL injection attacks. The 200k pages is based on a google search (he does not reveal what criteria he is searching for) which came back with 150k hits. So it is not clear how many actual sites are compromised. One could assume that once a phpBB site is compromised, every page of every thread, which is analogous to individual web pages, would redirect to the worm download site. A popular forum could easily have several thousand thread-pages. In fact, every single page would probably be redirecting, which would include each user's summary page (which would be in the thousands for even a small site). So a small number of cites could be accounting for all the 200k pages.
Also, in the video it is clear from the url that it is a phpBB2 site that is compromised. phpBB is currently at a major version of 3.
It's the same reason hackers devote so much time exploiting Windows - more bang for your buck. phpBB is everywhere.
Anyway, that's just the geek in me I guess, because I really do enjoy finding flaws in images. What I hate is an image that has a sort of surreal perfection to it that I know must be composited, but I can't find any smoking gun.
I don't know about that. Imagine all of the digital pictures taken that never travel outside the home user's computer, memory card or CDs. Even more important, consider the amount of digital video data generated by home users with their camcorders. A single 60 minute Mini-DV tape is in the neighborhood of 15 GB. That's one single tape, and my family alone has dozens of them just from a single year. Even if those videos are uploaded to the internet, they must first be converted to some other format that has a vastly lower bitrate. So the original gigabytes of data still never touches corporate infrastructure - only the small, crappy quality encodings that end up on YouTube.
They might also be counting swap files and hibernate files. In the case of hibernate files, a computer with 2 GB RAM generates 2 GB of data every time it hibernates.
A couple years ago when we moved into our current house we signed up for DSL. Things were good for a couple months, then connectivity became very poor and spotty. Throughput was bad, and the line would completely drop from time to time. We had 6 different tech guys come to our house. Each would hook up his diagnostic machine, which would sync up with the office and show really good connectivity and throughput. They swapped out our modem at least 4 times. They said that since the meter showed the line was good, the problem was mine. One guy started screwing around with my computers before I finally told him to stop (throughput was fine on my LAN). Finally, this one guy came out, and he was determined to get to the bottom of it. He at least had the intelligence to say that just because his equipment told him everything was fine, the fact that a modem couldn't sync meant otherwise. He ran a new line from the pole to the house. Then he helped run a new line all the way to my office (even though they're supposed to charge for that). He had a guy at the office switch the node we physically connected into. Still bad connectivity. So he then went from pole to pole from my house to the office, which is at least a dozen blocks. He finally found a splice that was connected with old-style crimp on connectors. Apparently there was some corrosion in them, which increased the resistance just exactly enough that the modem couldn't tolerate it, but the diagnostic equipment could (and the resistance was within tolerable limits). He replaced the splice, and everything has been perfect for well over a year. He gave me his own cell number and told me to call him direct if we ever had further problems.
So my point is not to jump to conclusions. There could be a physical problem with your line that happened about when the FiOS was rolling out. Try hooking your modem directly to your Network Interface Box (usually on the side of the house) with all of your interior wiring disconnected (should just be a little jumper going into a regular phone jack - unplug it and plug your modem straight in). If your throughput goes up, you have a problem with your interior wiring. If it doesn't, the DSL provider is obligated to fix the problem. Make sure you tell them that you hooked your modem up directly to the network interface box, because the tech person should then immediately schedule someone to come out instead of having you try bridging your DSL modem and a bunch of other worthless garbage. They will still probably tell you to hard-reset your modem, but after that then they should send someone out. As in my case, it might take several different techs to find someone that can actually help. Same with support on the phone. Some people would randomly pick things out of some list a computer showed them, and ask me to follow various worthless steps. Other people knew exactly what was not wrong, based on what I told them up front, and so they didn't beat around the bush.
Quite right, and this is actually the preferred scenario. If you are developing in an environment that performs more poorly than the production environment, then you won't be in for an unpleasant little surprise when your app hits the real world.
Perhaps this is true of new players, for whom the change of POV and death animation is new and thus entertaining. For someone used to the game, dying means losing, and most people don't play to lose, thus it doesn't make sense that they would find that enjoyable. When I play FPS games, the period after dying is often spent beating on my keyboard until I respawn, not enjoying an animation sequence I've seen plenty of times before.