It's the read-write to physical medium that are the bottleneck with the sneakernet now.
Yeah, but it's competing with high-speed networks that are crippled by the ISPs at both ends using a single fibre to feed an entire neighborhood, and intentionally slowing the speed at the customer's site to a crawl unless you pay an exorbitant rate for a higher speed (which is then unused 99% of the time, and doesn't deliver if 2 or 3 others in your neighborhood are using high speed at the same time).
It's not surprising that vehicle+SD card could outperform such a network. The ping times can be rather long, though.
It makes it much easier to spy on your own citizens when you do that.
Well, yes and no. The main thing to worry about is typified by this comment:
Among Brazil's plans are a domestic encrypted email service
It's possible that what this means is that Brazil's domestic email service will do the encryption. This would be no security at all, since it would mean that the email service has everyone's keys and can decrypt everyone's email. And possibly sell it to interested customers, such as the US government.
If they're serious about local security, what they'll do is study various end-to-end email encryption packages, and recommend the best ones to their citizens. End-to-end encryption is the only way to get actual security in email. And they'll want a public education campaign to teach people about the "gotchas". For example, you don't ever store your keys in "the cloud".
There have been proposals in the US that email encryption be done by the low-level IP software. This was rejected back in the 1960s by the ARPAnet folks (the military predecessor to the Internet), on the grounds that low-level encryption is inherently secure, since it's typically installed in a way that the user can't control or even see into. It could easily be sending your keys and/or decrypted email to arbitrary third parties, and most users would have no way of knowing about it.
Anyway, it could be interesting to know what the Brazilian planners are planning. Are they really aiming for a domestic email service that "handles" the encryption (i.e., no security at all)? Or are they planning to actually do it right?
Here in the US, we know the answer to that question as applied to our own government (and telecom companies;-). Is the Brazilian government any better?
When you begin to get into decent shape, you lose inches but actually GAIN weight, because muscle is 3 x as dense as fat.
It might be interesting to figure out where that silly claim originated. A quick check finds a number of sites online claiming that actual measurements (imagine that;-) find mammalian skeletal muscles to have a density of about 1.06, and mammalian fat has a density of about 0.9. A quick division turns up a ration of 1.18 between those, nowhere near 3.
If you want people to believe you, you really shouldn't use numbers that can be debunked by measurements that can be done fairly easily in any well-equipped kitchen with a few chunks of meat and fat that you can get at your local grocery stores. Yes, you can vary the results a bit, e.g. by cooking the fat out of the meat and the water out of the fat, but you won't get anywhere near a ratio of 3 for their density.
And "dense" isn't a difficult concept. Density is measured in grams per cc. Your kitchen scale can measure the grams, and the water-displacement method popularized by that ancient Greek guy is a very easy way to measure volume of oddly-shaped chunks, if you have a largish measuring cup. This is good enough to get 2-significant-digit measurements, or 3 if you have good tools and are more careful.
... I had gone to that page as well, but I was using NoScript, so I didn't load a virus onto the company network and didn't get fired.
Anyone who surfs the Web from an employer's machine and leaves scripting turned on is just asking for a disaster for which they are held accountable.
This is yet another anecdote illustrating why we should be trying to educate people about and common "dangers" of using the Web. One of the first lessons should be the idea that you don't download code from strangers and let it run it on your machine. Since "scripting" in web pages is code (unlike HTML markup, which isn't;-), leaving scripting on makes it easy for outsiders to insert software in your machine and run it. And you will be held responsible for the results.
Actually, I'd conjecture that when we finally meet intelligent extraterrestrials, we'll find that those who have technology are evenly divided between those whose geeks memorize pi to zillions of places and those who memorize tau to zillions of places (in whatever base they use).
But I don't expect to be around to learn whether my conjecture is correct.
... in which one faction points out that ads are funding much of the (commercial) Web, and if you suppress them, you won't have all that Free Content. Meanwhile another fraction is pointing out the huge waste of bandwidth and human time soaked up by all those annoying ads. And yet another faction takes the "Can't we all just get along" approach, by suggesting that the commercial folks should make their ads less annoying so that people don't suppress them.
Yeah, we've heard it all before, we'll hear it all again, and nothing much will change.
Even the DSM definition doesn't make a distinction between beliefs that are taught and those that appear spontaneously.
Funny; my first thought when I read the comments about beliefs that "appear spontaneously" is that I've had a number of beliefs like that. The spontaneousness of my beliefs was due to the fact that I'd suddenly seen (or found) firm evidence supporting a specific belief.
This has to be fairly common. Thus, I've personally seen a number of auto accidents, and in most of them, it was fairly obvious that a specific driver had triggered the accident. To someone who wasn't there, believing that one driver was at fault might be a delusion, but to someone who witnessed the event, the "spontaneous belief" would be based on observed facts and not delusional at all (though still possibly wrong).
So what else could someone mean by a phrase like "spontaneous belief"? It reads like a phrase that's intended to deprecate someone's beliefs, but I could be misreading it.
(Note that, in common speech, "belief" simply means anything you believe to be true; it's orthogonal to "factual". This is the basis of people treating things like evolutionary theory or econometric theory or the theory of universal gravitation or stories on Fox News as "beliefs".;-)
Chinese is a... a bunch of mutually unintelligible but related languages, similar to the group of languages spoken in western Europe today that evolved in similar ways over a similar period of time. They're more able to communicate across the language barriers because their written language is ideographic.
A reasonable summary, based on various linguistically knowledgeable source that I've read. A useful comparison seems to be with the Romance languages. The Chinese politically-based practice of calling their languages "dialects" is often explained by imagining that Europeans did something similar: All the Romance languages would be considered "dialects" of Latin. Only Latin would be taught in schools, and other languages would be written using Latin spelling and grammar. This was tried for some time in Europe, but they finally came to their senses during the last few centuries, and developed reasonable spelling systems for each of the modern "Latin dialects" such as French, Portuguese, and R[ou]manian. Latin writing simply doesn't work well for those modern languges.
I've seen criticism of the "All Chinese dialects are written the same" based on this. It was true a few centuries ago that most literate people in Europe wrote the same, in Latin, but this only made communication possible with others who had learned Latin. It wasn't really usable as a way of writing Italian or Spanish, though; it was just writing in the predecessor language. Similarly, the various Chinese languages are different enough in grammar and vocabulary that using "standard Chinese" writing doesn't really constitute writing their native language; it is really just writing in the predecessor language (or its modern descendant spoken in one major northern city;-).
But it can be interesting to read discussions of such topics by linguistically-naive people, to see just how confused they usually are about language-related topics. And we've seen a bit of linguistic nonsense here, both by the native speakers of various Chinese languages, and by others just reporting what they've learned from other misinformed sources.
An interesting point about the Romance languages is that their speakers often do find the others' written forms easier to understand than the spoken forms. This is because the spelling systems have tended to preserve original Latin spellings that hide many of the phonetic differences in the way that letters are used. This makes understanding the writing possible in some cases where the pronunciation would be too different to understand without special study.
Something similar does seem to be partially successful with Chinese writing. But in both cases, the result is often misunderstandings, or simple confusion about what that funny writing could possibly mean. And, like the Romance languages, the Chinese have invented a lot of new characters to improve understandability. English has done this, too. Thus, Latin didn't have the letters 'J', 'K' or 'W', which many European languages find useful. Cantonese similarly has a long list of characters never used in Mandarin, to fix some of the major problems with using Mandarin to express Cantonese. Most of the other Chinese languages are simply not written, because the standard writing system doesn't work for them.
But I wouldn't expect the misunderstandings in such topics to disappear. People would have to pick up some actual linguistic understanding for that to happen, and that'd be too much work.
7). "Reverse seeding of life, from Earth to Mars, did not happen." This may be easier to support. Earth's gravity well is greater than Mars. However ruling it out will be extremely difficult.
Actually, some astronomers looked at this back in the 1970s, and concluded that at the bacterial level, Earth to Mars travel is fairly easy, and has almost certainly been going on since early in the Solar System's history.
The mistake people are making is thinking that impacts ejecting rocks are the way that bacterial would make such trips. The astronomers examined and verified the effectiveness of an entirely different mechanism. The Earth (and all the planets with atmospheres) has a "cometary tail" produced by the solar wind. This tail is mostly gases, of course, but it also includes a small proportion of dust-like particles. It turns out that this includes bacterial spores, which have been found at all levels of the Earth's atmosphere, and have probably been there for a few billion years.
The Earth's cometary dust tail is thin, but it is of interest to astronomers. Taking pictures through a haze of air and dust is more difficult than avoiding the air and dust, so some astronomers need to keep track of our planet's tail and avoid it when possible.
Anyway, measurements back in the 1970s did show that the Earth's dust tail contains small particles the size of bacterial spores, and since they exist in our upper atmosphere, they are to be expected in the tail. How long they can survive in space isn't well understood, but tests in orbit have shown some rather good survival rates of the spores when exposed to conditions near our planet.
So the solar wind has been pushing small quantities of Earth's air outward for a few billion years, and that includes assorted tiny dust particles and bacterial spores. This has to have "contaminated" all the outer planets with Earth's bacteria for all that time. Whether they've survived anywhere else isn't known, but Mars is the most likely place.
Some of the astronomers have also calculated the spread of our dust tail outside the Solar System. Most of it does escape eventually, and gets lost out in interstellar space. We make an orbit around the galaxy roughly every 220 million years, so since life arose on Earth, we've been spraying the galaxy with our bacterial spores for around 15 to 20 orbits.
How such spores survive out there, nobody knows, of course. But it's an interesting thing to consider when the "panspermia" hypothesis comes up. Any planet that develops bacterial life will, probably within a billion years or so, start spraying them out into the galaxy like we do, possibly contaminating any compatible planet anywhere else in the galaxy over the next few billion years.
(I recently read somewhere an estimate, based on current measurements of the solar system's dust, the likelihood of spores from Earth hitting Earth-size planets around stars at various distances. The numbers were nonzero, but I took them all with a grain of salt -- also included in the dust -- since so little is known about the reality of interstellar space and the likelihood of a spore surviving a trip that may last a few million years.)
They could write an invoice for 1 year of priority support for the next year.
I've seen a number of free/open software projects that ask for funding along this line, often to fix bugs or implement new features. It seems to work pretty well.
You can also find something similar among the flock of (sometimes very good) online cartoonists. You can "contribute" by paying them for a specific date's cartoon, for example. Sometimes they'll "pay" you by sending an "original" printout of the cartoon, which of course really only exists in their computer's file system, but they do have a (color) printer, and there's a long pre-Internet tradition behind the sale of such artwork.
There should be lots of ways to donate money to "support" what they are doing, especially if you're using their software. And paying for new features is a friendly way to do it. Everyone knows how expensive corporate software development can be, so you should be able to pay what would be a significant N-month "contracting" salary without any auditors batting an eye. They know how expensive in-house software can be to develop.
Imagine if you receipt at the grocery store listed the total of all 20 things you bought, then divided them evenly between all 20 items so your milk is $2.94, your bread is $2.94, your lettuce is $2.94, your apples are $2.94, and so on, I'm sure that a lot of people wouldn't even look. A few might raise hell over the numbers.
That's pretty close to what really happens. Some decades back, when the first stories started to appear about the $1000 hammer or $5000 power cord or whatever, there were also occasional stories from people familiar with the accounting practices who explained the bogosity of the calculations. Of course, people just ignored this, and repeated the stories as evidence of administrative (usually government) idiocy.
The basis of it all generally turned out to be the fact that many organizations (especially government) explicitly list an "administrative fee" on their invoices when purchased through the usual purchasing department. This is typically a fixed percentage of the bottom-line price. People would simply divide this charge by the number of items, to get the per-item administrative fee, and add it to an item's price to get the item's "cost".
Thus, it's common to have separate power cords, due to the different plugs needed in different parts of the world, So you might have an order for a computer (10,000), plus a cord that fits your wall outlets ($10), for a total of $10,010. If the administrative fee is 10%, the total charged your department is $11,011. You critics will then list the charge for each item as $1,001 / 2, or $500.50, so your price for the computer is $10,500.50, and the price of the cord is $510.50.
That's a pretty expensive power cord, right?
Not that we should expect any such accountant's explanation to have any effect on the situation. That would take all the fun out of reporting on bureaucratic idiocies (that our political opponents support, of course).
And there might well be $500 power cords. They might include things like a transformer that adapts to a wide variety of line voltages, generate AC output of a different frequency than the input, or have a storage battery to get through short power fluctuations, etc. But that's a different explanation, with different ways of misleading your readers or listeners.
You could be reading it wrong. Note that it explicitly says "life expectancy at birth". There has been a lot of criticism of this sort of things from statistics-enabled researchers, who point out that almost all of the life-expectancy gains in the past century have been through elimination of most early-childhood deaths. Life expentancy at birth has increased, but the life expectancy of someone 30 or 60 years old hasn't actually changed much.
There has been a bit of publicity around related topics lately. Thus, there has been a lot of discussion of the apparent fact that the increase in mammograms has produced no measurable increase in lifetime, just an increase in medical bills for the testing (and the "treatment" of false positives;-). Similar statistical problems have been reported for prostate-cancer screening, and for an assortment of other medical tests.
Another statistical trick used to make things look better than they are is the common practice of giving cancer survival rates in terms of survival 5 years after diagnosis. This means, for example, that if you were to come up with a new test that diagnoses a cancer 5 years earlier than any existing test, your test would result in a 100% "cure" rate even with no further treatment, and no change in the death statistics. I've heard a couple of interviews in which the interviewer points out this problem, and the interviewee just continues talking about the same "5-year survival" figures.
In general, it seems that if you're over 10 years old, modern medicine really hasn't done much in increase your (statistical) lifespan, though it is sometimes fairly good at extracting money for treatments that don't increase lifespan.
(Perhaps some of the treatments improve quality of life, but the statistics for that don't seem to be widely studied or reported. It might be interesting to be shown wrong in this regard, however. OTOH, there has been a bit of media coverage lately of the problems with "treatment" of false positives.)
(And a more general problem here is that the general public -- and the media -- is generally ignorant of even the most basic statistical concepts.)
... the NSA just found out about the hundred flowers campaign,...
We now have well over 100 flowers blooming in our (average-size, suburban) yard. Should be be worried that the NSA are monitoring our gardening?
But the daylilies are nearly done; I've started to cut down the not-very-attractive stems that they've left behind. I wonder if the NSA has recorded this behavior. We were also wishing we'd kept records of when our various perennials bloomed, so we could see what effect the climate change has had on our yard. Maybe we should ask the NSA for that information.
(And firefox doesn't recognize "daylilies" as an English word. I did a quick google check, and even when I asked for "day-lily", most of the hits had it as one word with no space or hyphen. Most of the technical botanical pages spell it as one word. I guess we still have a long way to go before our vaunted natural-language software can even handle something as simple as dictionary lookup.;-)
Well, I've occasionally wondered when it would occur to people to lump these rather disparate groups together, with a phrasing implying that the people involved are both.;-)
After all, it's been some time since the media decided that "hacker" should no longer mean someone who enjoys tinkering with technology and is good at it, and conflated that term with "criminal". It's about time that other groups that believe in various sorts of freedoms to get the same treatment.
It's actually a bit surprising that it took so long to read someone conflate "libertarian" and "criminal". I wonder what other groups are overdue for this treatment...
The most cursory search will turn up similar complaints for every OS's library random-number routine, over the history of computing. It's quite common for a random-number routine that has been good for years to suddenly become non-random in a new release. Basic advice has always been that, if it's important to have truly "random" numbers with any specific property, you should simply ignore any routines that came from vendors. You should look in "the literature" for routines with the properties you need, and have a good programmer (i.e., one who can handle basic arithmetic;-) to code it up in whatever language you're using.
And part of your testing suite is a test of your random-number routines(s), to verify that they are still generating numbers with the appropriate level of randomness. It's funny what things like "improved" optimizations in the compiler can do to the correctness of such code.
If the bitcoin software managers are using any OS's random-number generators, well, they're just incompetent. Their job should be handed to someone with minimal understanding of the math that they're using. Someone who will ensure that other managers don't force their programmers to do it wrong.
(Yes, I have been ordered by several managers to implement incorrect arithmetic. I've generally responded by writing and distributing a proof of the incorrectness of my orders, and updated my resume. Sometimes they've responded by putting me in charge of the math routines in question. But far more often, I've found a new job.;-)
(But this wasn't quite as funny as the case where a manager gave us written orders that clearly required that we implement messages that went faster than light. We quickly learned that his superiors supported him, so the entire team had new jobs a week later. We eventually learned that the product was finally abandoned.;-)
... we should probably also note that the US government (the NSA's sole sponsor) was the culprit responsible for the invention of the Internet (initially ARPAnet) in the first place. Private corporations would never have built anything like it, as can be seen by the way they have so consistently resisted or attempted to sabotage it all along the way.
Of course, one could also make a similar observation about things like the US Constitution. In both cases, we have had to fight an ongoing battle, political and legal, to maintain the freedom and openness built into the original. We haven't always had total success at this. The natural state is that our "rulers" constantly try to subvert such things that interfere with their power over us.
The NSA is just one of the more recent instances of this. Anyone at all familiar with US (and network) history should be able to rattle off a long list of similar actions on the part of those who want control over our lives.
Not that there is anything specifically "American" about this. It's hard to find any government (or corporation;-) anywhere that doesn't behave similarly. It's just part of "the human condition", as the literary folks would express it.
Prediction: Legal measures to fix this situation will have no effect. The government will simply create a new secret agency with a new name, which will use different words to describe what they're doing, and it'll be just a continuation of the NSA's work. Does anyone have any accurate count of how many times this has already happened? (Likely not; some of them probably never became public.;-)
your average European or American is generally pretty rational.
Then why does the average American support TSA and why is the average European against nuclear energy?
Note that "pretty rational" isn't exactly what you'd call a precise estimate. As a number, "pretty" basically means whatever the speaker/writer wanted it to mean (while probably hoping that most readers would misread it as "many";-).
If you assign to "pretty" the meaning "50th percentile", you might get a better feel for what the writer might have meant by the claim of "generally pretty rational" in the EU/US populations.
As George Carlin put it: "Think about the average person, how stupid they are, and realize that half of the people are stupider than that". And there's the old mass-media explanation that their material is usually written so the people at the 5th- or 10th-percentile in intelligence can understand it.
Sometimes it seems that the/. crowd has adopted the same approach...
Motorola was caught red-handed sending *all* data you put on the phone back to Motorola over unencrypted HTTP. The data included passwords, pictures you have taken, etc.
Motorola is now right next to Sony on my "do not trust" list.
You should maybe take into consideration, that this phone is really the 1st from Motorola where it's been owned by Google.
Well, maybe, but it might be a few years too late for that. I recall a few years back, when I stumbled across some warnings that the Google toolbar acted similarly. Out of curiosity, I set up a simple test. I created a honeypot directory, hidden behind an active index.html file, and linked a few files into it. I watched for a few days, and while the index.html file was downloaded at the usual couple thousand hits per day, the honeypot didn't show up in the server's access_log file.
Then I installed the Google Toolbar in a couple of browsers on another machine, and waited another day, and verified that the honeypot still had had no accesses. So far, so good. Then I went to one of those browsers, typed in the URL for the honeypot, got a list of its files in the browser's window, and started checking the access_log file over on the server.
After about 3 minutes, the access_log showed an access to the honeypot from a googlebot. I verified that the IP address was owned by google. A few minutes later, all the files in the honeypot had also been accessed by other googlebots. The only possible explanation for this is that the toolbar had reported the URL back to the google database.
I removed the Google toolbars, and have never installed them (or any other toolbar) in any browser that I use "for real" (as contrasted with those used for web testing). I verified that the honeypot was still being accessed by googlebots. I removed the honeypot.
A check a year later showed that the honeypot and its files were still findable via google. This tells me a lot about google's policy on such backdoors. If you trust anything that came with them to keep your data private, you may be in for some unpleasant surprises.
And that's even ignoring the fact that you'll need a lawyer to interpret the law, and decide which types of job will require the new tax, and which will not.
This is what worries me. Specifically, do we have a legal definition of that term "standardized" that I keep reading in association with this law?
Usually, in contrast with common speech (where "standard" means "the way we do it";-), the legal meaning of "standard" means following an official standards document published by an official standards agency. But I suspect that this might not be the definition in this law.
For example, suppose I wrote something a few years ago, which turns out to be useful to a new client, so I save them some billing time and just give them a copy. Does this qualify as a piece of "standardized" software simply because I've used it before? If so, how do I bill them? I ordinarily wouldn't charge for small pieces of code like this, or just bill for the time to test it on their system. Am I risking a huge fine or jail time if I don't charge them and send a few dollars to the state?
OTOH, most of my code is linked to libc, which is an implementation of an official, published standard (POSIX). So is everything linked to libc, including a little 5-line throwaway piece of C code, legally considered "standardized" because the executable contains libc routines?
Should I anticipate such little pieces of incidental code requiring thousands of dollars of legal and accounting fees to determine how to bill for them, in order to pay a few dollars in service tax? I can see legal and accounting work costing far more than my few minutes of billable time to locate a program in my library, compile it, and test it on the client's system.
You missed the point--he's saying that root access might one day no longer be necessary,...
Actually, people have been claiming since the early days of unix (back in the 1970s) that root never has been "necessary". I've read a number of discussions triggered by such claims. They all reduce to the same conclusion: Yes, in a well-run computing environment, in which all vendors and users understood all the security issues and agreed on their solutions -- and implemented them all correctly -- the root id wouldn't be necessary. But we never have been anywhere near close to such an ideal. And until then, root is needed to cleanly fix the permission messes that our current practices so often produce.
I've been, uh, "discussing" an example of this on a web server where I'm the maintainer of one of the web sites. The site is actually replicated on my home machine and on another remote machine. I make changes on my home machine, then rsync the three machines when a change is working to my satisfaction. On the two remote machines, rsync has always produced a lot of bogus permission errors (while correctly copying the files). The reason is that some of the files are created by the web server, and are thus owned by the web server's id, not by mine. The code can enable world read/write permissions for everything, so the rsyncs all work. But due to the mismatch in ownership, rsync complains that it can't fix the permissions.
This is a problem for one important reason: Whenever the software gives such floods of bogus error messages, they bury the actual error messages, and teaches the users to ignore error messages (since all of them that you see are so bogus;-). This isn't an ideal situation, if you want people to correctly spot problems and fix them.
It turns out that I can "fix" many of these problems if I spot them early enough. None of my login ids can fix them, since the logins don't match between the 3 machines and I don't have admin access to the others. But on my own machine, I can often use "sudo" to adjust permissions so that rsync won't produce so many bogus error messages. But I haven't stumbled across a way to fix them all.
I have occasionally persuaded (nicely;-) an admin on one of the other machines to use a similar sudo to give me control of my own files, but they usually consider this a bother, and don't do it. I need to stay on good working terms with them, so I don't push it.
Anyway, I'd agree that root isn't, stricktly speaking, "necessary" right now. But it's often the least time-wasting solutions to all the annoying permission problems that typical machine setups produce. On a well-done server machine, owners of a web site would have group "www" permission, and could fix most such problems, but I don't think I've ever worked on a server that's run that way (except the servers that I run myself;-). And so on.
I have an Android phone that at random times gives me what look like permission errors. I've investigated, but so far haven't found a solution other than rooting the gadget. I haven't actually done that, so once again, the machine's "security" setup is teaching me to ignore error messages, since they're usually sinkholes of time that I can't do anything about.
(I've never kept anything important on my phone for more than an hour or so, and treat it all as "transient" stuff that can disappear any second. I've occasionally worked on some apps, but tend to minimize testing on the phone itself due to the confusion of all the permission problems. Maybe this'll change some day. Or maybe I'll just stick with developing "apps" that run inside the browser, and continue with the mess that that "OS" is.;-)
Interested folk might want to dig up the archaeologists' writings on several events that are precedents for this story. The best documented case is the flooding of the Mediterranean basin, but that was about 5 million years ago, before humans exist. A similar event occurred about 8000 years ago, when rising sea waters broke through the Straight of Bosporus, and flooded the Black sea, which was lower due to lack of water sources during the earlier ice age. There is also some evidence for an ice-age drying up of the Red Sea, and a similar flood that filled it. There is weak evidence that this has happened multiple times in the Black and Red Seas, as the ice sheets expanded and retreated.
So the idea that this may happen again in the future is not especially radical; it's just a repeat of something that has happened repeatedly. If you live near the channel that fills the basin, it's probably pretty dramatic for the months or years that it takes. In other areas, it's just a slow rise of the sea, flooding out your homes.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the read-write to physical medium that are the bottleneck with the sneakernet now.
Yeah, but it's competing with high-speed networks that are crippled by the ISPs at both ends using a single fibre to feed an entire neighborhood, and intentionally slowing the speed at the customer's site to a crawl unless you pay an exorbitant rate for a higher speed (which is then unused 99% of the time, and doesn't deliver if 2 or 3 others in your neighborhood are using high speed at the same time).
It's not surprising that vehicle+SD card could outperform such a network. The ping times can be rather long, though.
It makes it much easier to spy on your own citizens when you do that.
Well, yes and no. The main thing to worry about is typified by this comment:
Among Brazil's plans are a domestic encrypted email service
It's possible that what this means is that Brazil's domestic email service will do the encryption. This would be no security at all, since it would mean that the email service has everyone's keys and can decrypt everyone's email. And possibly sell it to interested customers, such as the US government.
If they're serious about local security, what they'll do is study various end-to-end email encryption packages, and recommend the best ones to their citizens. End-to-end encryption is the only way to get actual security in email. And they'll want a public education campaign to teach people about the "gotchas". For example, you don't ever store your keys in "the cloud".
There have been proposals in the US that email encryption be done by the low-level IP software. This was rejected back in the 1960s by the ARPAnet folks (the military predecessor to the Internet), on the grounds that low-level encryption is inherently secure, since it's typically installed in a way that the user can't control or even see into. It could easily be sending your keys and/or decrypted email to arbitrary third parties, and most users would have no way of knowing about it.
Anyway, it could be interesting to know what the Brazilian planners are planning. Are they really aiming for a domestic email service that "handles" the encryption (i.e., no security at all)? Or are they planning to actually do it right?
Here in the US, we know the answer to that question as applied to our own government (and telecom companies ;-). Is the Brazilian government any better?
When you begin to get into decent shape, you lose inches but actually GAIN weight, because muscle is 3 x as dense as fat.
It might be interesting to figure out where that silly claim originated. A quick check finds a number of sites online claiming that actual measurements (imagine that ;-) find mammalian skeletal muscles to have a density of about 1.06, and mammalian fat has a density of about 0.9. A quick division turns up a ration of 1.18 between those, nowhere near 3.
If you want people to believe you, you really shouldn't use numbers that can be debunked by measurements that can be done fairly easily in any well-equipped kitchen with a few chunks of meat and fat that you can get at your local grocery stores. Yes, you can vary the results a bit, e.g. by cooking the fat out of the meat and the water out of the fat, but you won't get anywhere near a ratio of 3 for their density.
And "dense" isn't a difficult concept. Density is measured in grams per cc. Your kitchen scale can measure the grams, and the water-displacement method popularized by that ancient Greek guy is a very easy way to measure volume of oddly-shaped chunks, if you have a largish measuring cup. This is good enough to get 2-significant-digit measurements, or 3 if you have good tools and are more careful.
... I had gone to that page as well, but I was using NoScript, so I didn't load a virus onto the company network and didn't get fired.
Anyone who surfs the Web from an employer's machine and leaves scripting turned on is just asking for a disaster for which they are held accountable.
This is yet another anecdote illustrating why we should be trying to educate people about and common "dangers" of using the Web. One of the first lessons should be the idea that you don't download code from strangers and let it run it on your machine. Since "scripting" in web pages is code (unlike HTML markup, which isn't ;-), leaving scripting on makes it easy for outsiders to insert software in your machine and run it. And you will be held responsible for the results.
Because everyone loves Pi!
Yeah, except for the faction that prefers tau. ;-)
Actually, I'd conjecture that when we finally meet intelligent extraterrestrials, we'll find that those who have technology are evenly divided between those whose geeks memorize pi to zillions of places and those who memorize tau to zillions of places (in whatever base they use).
But I don't expect to be around to learn whether my conjecture is correct.
Ooops! I forgot the mandatory "FRIST!!!" meme. Will this suffice?
And I get a "Slow down, cowboy!" message when I posted this. Too much coffee today, I guess.
Well, so much for a minor attempt at humor ...
Hmmm ... I wonder how long you have to wait before replying to your own post. This doesn't seem to be documented anywhere that I can find.
It appears that 4 minutes still isn't long enough. Brief pause to get another cup of coffee ...
Yeah, we've heard it all before, we'll hear it all again, and nothing much will change.
Don't we have to have a declared war to actually have a true charge of treason?
For the past half century or so, we haven't had to declare war to fight a war, so why would we need such a declaration to charge someone with treason?
(Trivia question: When was the last time that the US Congress actually declared war? And: How many wars has the US been engaged in since then?)
Even the DSM definition doesn't make a distinction between beliefs that are taught and those that appear spontaneously.
Funny; my first thought when I read the comments about beliefs that "appear spontaneously" is that I've had a number of beliefs like that. The spontaneousness of my beliefs was due to the fact that I'd suddenly seen (or found) firm evidence supporting a specific belief.
This has to be fairly common. Thus, I've personally seen a number of auto accidents, and in most of them, it was fairly obvious that a specific driver had triggered the accident. To someone who wasn't there, believing that one driver was at fault might be a delusion, but to someone who witnessed the event, the "spontaneous belief" would be based on observed facts and not delusional at all (though still possibly wrong).
So what else could someone mean by a phrase like "spontaneous belief"? It reads like a phrase that's intended to deprecate someone's beliefs, but I could be misreading it.
(Note that, in common speech, "belief" simply means anything you believe to be true; it's orthogonal to "factual". This is the basis of people treating things like evolutionary theory or econometric theory or the theory of universal gravitation or stories on Fox News as "beliefs". ;-)
Chinese is a ... a bunch of mutually unintelligible but related languages, similar to the group of languages spoken in western Europe today that evolved in similar ways over a similar period of time. They're more able to communicate across the language barriers because their written language is ideographic.
A reasonable summary, based on various linguistically knowledgeable source that I've read. A useful comparison seems to be with the Romance languages. The Chinese politically-based practice of calling their languages "dialects" is often explained by imagining that Europeans did something similar: All the Romance languages would be considered "dialects" of Latin. Only Latin would be taught in schools, and other languages would be written using Latin spelling and grammar. This was tried for some time in Europe, but they finally came to their senses during the last few centuries, and developed reasonable spelling systems for each of the modern "Latin dialects" such as French, Portuguese, and R[ou]manian. Latin writing simply doesn't work well for those modern languges.
I've seen criticism of the "All Chinese dialects are written the same" based on this. It was true a few centuries ago that most literate people in Europe wrote the same, in Latin, but this only made communication possible with others who had learned Latin. It wasn't really usable as a way of writing Italian or Spanish, though; it was just writing in the predecessor language. Similarly, the various Chinese languages are different enough in grammar and vocabulary that using "standard Chinese" writing doesn't really constitute writing their native language; it is really just writing in the predecessor language (or its modern descendant spoken in one major northern city ;-).
But it can be interesting to read discussions of such topics by linguistically-naive people, to see just how confused they usually are about language-related topics. And we've seen a bit of linguistic nonsense here, both by the native speakers of various Chinese languages, and by others just reporting what they've learned from other misinformed sources.
An interesting point about the Romance languages is that their speakers often do find the others' written forms easier to understand than the spoken forms. This is because the spelling systems have tended to preserve original Latin spellings that hide many of the phonetic differences in the way that letters are used. This makes understanding the writing possible in some cases where the pronunciation would be too different to understand without special study.
Something similar does seem to be partially successful with Chinese writing. But in both cases, the result is often misunderstandings, or simple confusion about what that funny writing could possibly mean. And, like the Romance languages, the Chinese have invented a lot of new characters to improve understandability. English has done this, too. Thus, Latin didn't have the letters 'J', 'K' or 'W', which many European languages find useful. Cantonese similarly has a long list of characters never used in Mandarin, to fix some of the major problems with using Mandarin to express Cantonese. Most of the other Chinese languages are simply not written, because the standard writing system doesn't work for them.
But I wouldn't expect the misunderstandings in such topics to disappear. People would have to pick up some actual linguistic understanding for that to happen, and that'd be too much work.
7). "Reverse seeding of life, from Earth to Mars, did not happen." This may be easier to support. Earth's gravity well is greater than Mars. However ruling it out will be extremely difficult.
Actually, some astronomers looked at this back in the 1970s, and concluded that at the bacterial level, Earth to Mars travel is fairly easy, and has almost certainly been going on since early in the Solar System's history.
The mistake people are making is thinking that impacts ejecting rocks are the way that bacterial would make such trips. The astronomers examined and verified the effectiveness of an entirely different mechanism. The Earth (and all the planets with atmospheres) has a "cometary tail" produced by the solar wind. This tail is mostly gases, of course, but it also includes a small proportion of dust-like particles. It turns out that this includes bacterial spores, which have been found at all levels of the Earth's atmosphere, and have probably been there for a few billion years.
The Earth's cometary dust tail is thin, but it is of interest to astronomers. Taking pictures through a haze of air and dust is more difficult than avoiding the air and dust, so some astronomers need to keep track of our planet's tail and avoid it when possible.
Anyway, measurements back in the 1970s did show that the Earth's dust tail contains small particles the size of bacterial spores, and since they exist in our upper atmosphere, they are to be expected in the tail. How long they can survive in space isn't well understood, but tests in orbit have shown some rather good survival rates of the spores when exposed to conditions near our planet.
So the solar wind has been pushing small quantities of Earth's air outward for a few billion years, and that includes assorted tiny dust particles and bacterial spores. This has to have "contaminated" all the outer planets with Earth's bacteria for all that time. Whether they've survived anywhere else isn't known, but Mars is the most likely place.
Some of the astronomers have also calculated the spread of our dust tail outside the Solar System. Most of it does escape eventually, and gets lost out in interstellar space. We make an orbit around the galaxy roughly every 220 million years, so since life arose on Earth, we've been spraying the galaxy with our bacterial spores for around 15 to 20 orbits.
How such spores survive out there, nobody knows, of course. But it's an interesting thing to consider when the "panspermia" hypothesis comes up. Any planet that develops bacterial life will, probably within a billion years or so, start spraying them out into the galaxy like we do, possibly contaminating any compatible planet anywhere else in the galaxy over the next few billion years.
(I recently read somewhere an estimate, based on current measurements of the solar system's dust, the likelihood of spores from Earth hitting Earth-size planets around stars at various distances. The numbers were nonzero, but I took them all with a grain of salt -- also included in the dust -- since so little is known about the reality of interstellar space and the likelihood of a spore surviving a trip that may last a few million years.)
They could write an invoice for 1 year of priority support for the next year.
I've seen a number of free/open software projects that ask for funding along this line, often to fix bugs or implement new features. It seems to work pretty well.
You can also find something similar among the flock of (sometimes very good) online cartoonists. You can "contribute" by paying them for a specific date's cartoon, for example. Sometimes they'll "pay" you by sending an "original" printout of the cartoon, which of course really only exists in their computer's file system, but they do have a (color) printer, and there's a long pre-Internet tradition behind the sale of such artwork.
There should be lots of ways to donate money to "support" what they are doing, especially if you're using their software. And paying for new features is a friendly way to do it. Everyone knows how expensive corporate software development can be, so you should be able to pay what would be a significant N-month "contracting" salary without any auditors batting an eye. They know how expensive in-house software can be to develop.
Imagine if you receipt at the grocery store listed the total of all 20 things you bought, then divided them evenly between all 20 items so your milk is $2.94, your bread is $2.94, your lettuce is $2.94, your apples are $2.94, and so on, I'm sure that a lot of people wouldn't even look. A few might raise hell over the numbers.
That's pretty close to what really happens. Some decades back, when the first stories started to appear about the $1000 hammer or $5000 power cord or whatever, there were also occasional stories from people familiar with the accounting practices who explained the bogosity of the calculations. Of course, people just ignored this, and repeated the stories as evidence of administrative (usually government) idiocy.
The basis of it all generally turned out to be the fact that many organizations (especially government) explicitly list an "administrative fee" on their invoices when purchased through the usual purchasing department. This is typically a fixed percentage of the bottom-line price. People would simply divide this charge by the number of items, to get the per-item administrative fee, and add it to an item's price to get the item's "cost".
Thus, it's common to have separate power cords, due to the different plugs needed in different parts of the world, So you might have an order for a computer (10,000), plus a cord that fits your wall outlets ($10), for a total of $10,010. If the administrative fee is 10%, the total charged your department is $11,011. You critics will then list the charge for each item as $1,001 / 2, or $500.50, so your price for the computer is $10,500.50, and the price of the cord is $510.50.
That's a pretty expensive power cord, right?
Not that we should expect any such accountant's explanation to have any effect on the situation. That would take all the fun out of reporting on bureaucratic idiocies (that our political opponents support, of course).
And there might well be $500 power cords. They might include things like a transformer that adapts to a wide variety of line voltages, generate AC output of a different frequency than the input, or have a storage battery to get through short power fluctuations, etc. But that's a different explanation, with different ways of misleading your readers or listeners.
Why the hell are they using ipad minis instead of much cheaper, less locked-in and generally more user-friendly android pads?
Probably the usual reason: Apple slipped kickbacks to the right people at the school. That's how it's usually done.
I could be reading this wrong, but it looks like life expectancy is trending upwards since the 50's. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005148.html
You could be reading it wrong. Note that it explicitly says "life expectancy at birth". There has been a lot of criticism of this sort of things from statistics-enabled researchers, who point out that almost all of the life-expectancy gains in the past century have been through elimination of most early-childhood deaths. Life expentancy at birth has increased, but the life expectancy of someone 30 or 60 years old hasn't actually changed much.
There has been a bit of publicity around related topics lately. Thus, there has been a lot of discussion of the apparent fact that the increase in mammograms has produced no measurable increase in lifetime, just an increase in medical bills for the testing (and the "treatment" of false positives ;-). Similar statistical problems have been reported for prostate-cancer screening, and for an assortment of other medical tests.
Another statistical trick used to make things look better than they are is the common practice of giving cancer survival rates in terms of survival 5 years after diagnosis. This means, for example, that if you were to come up with a new test that diagnoses a cancer 5 years earlier than any existing test, your test would result in a 100% "cure" rate even with no further treatment, and no change in the death statistics. I've heard a couple of interviews in which the interviewer points out this problem, and the interviewee just continues talking about the same "5-year survival" figures.
In general, it seems that if you're over 10 years old, modern medicine really hasn't done much in increase your (statistical) lifespan, though it is sometimes fairly good at extracting money for treatments that don't increase lifespan.
(Perhaps some of the treatments improve quality of life, but the statistics for that don't seem to be widely studied or reported. It might be interesting to be shown wrong in this regard, however. OTOH, there has been a bit of media coverage lately of the problems with "treatment" of false positives.)
(And a more general problem here is that the general public -- and the media -- is generally ignorant of even the most basic statistical concepts.)
... the NSA just found out about the hundred flowers campaign, ...
We now have well over 100 flowers blooming in our (average-size, suburban) yard. Should be be worried that the NSA are monitoring our gardening?
But the daylilies are nearly done; I've started to cut down the not-very-attractive stems that they've left behind. I wonder if the NSA has recorded this behavior. We were also wishing we'd kept records of when our various perennials bloomed, so we could see what effect the climate change has had on our yard. Maybe we should ask the NSA for that information.
(And firefox doesn't recognize "daylilies" as an English word. I did a quick google check, and even when I asked for "day-lily", most of the hits had it as one word with no space or hyphen. Most of the technical botanical pages spell it as one word. I guess we still have a long way to go before our vaunted natural-language software can even handle something as simple as dictionary lookup. ;-)
Well, I've occasionally wondered when it would occur to people to lump these rather disparate groups together, with a phrasing implying that the people involved are both. ;-)
After all, it's been some time since the media decided that "hacker" should no longer mean someone who enjoys tinkering with technology and is good at it, and conflated that term with "criminal". It's about time that other groups that believe in various sorts of freedoms to get the same treatment.
It's actually a bit surprising that it took so long to read someone conflate "libertarian" and "criminal". I wonder what other groups are overdue for this treatment ...
The most cursory search will turn up similar complaints for every OS's library random-number routine, over the history of computing. It's quite common for a random-number routine that has been good for years to suddenly become non-random in a new release. Basic advice has always been that, if it's important to have truly "random" numbers with any specific property, you should simply ignore any routines that came from vendors. You should look in "the literature" for routines with the properties you need, and have a good programmer (i.e., one who can handle basic arithmetic ;-) to code it up in whatever language you're using.
And part of your testing suite is a test of your random-number routines(s), to verify that they are still generating numbers with the appropriate level of randomness. It's funny what things like "improved" optimizations in the compiler can do to the correctness of such code.
If the bitcoin software managers are using any OS's random-number generators, well, they're just incompetent. Their job should be handed to someone with minimal understanding of the math that they're using. Someone who will ensure that other managers don't force their programmers to do it wrong.
(Yes, I have been ordered by several managers to implement incorrect arithmetic. I've generally responded by writing and distributing a proof of the incorrectness of my orders, and updated my resume. Sometimes they've responded by putting me in charge of the math routines in question. But far more often, I've found a new job. ;-)
(But this wasn't quite as funny as the case where a manager gave us written orders that clearly required that we implement messages that went faster than light. We quickly learned that his superiors supported him, so the entire team had new jobs a week later. We eventually learned that the product was finally abandoned. ;-)
Of course, one could also make a similar observation about things like the US Constitution. In both cases, we have had to fight an ongoing battle, political and legal, to maintain the freedom and openness built into the original. We haven't always had total success at this. The natural state is that our "rulers" constantly try to subvert such things that interfere with their power over us.
The NSA is just one of the more recent instances of this. Anyone at all familiar with US (and network) history should be able to rattle off a long list of similar actions on the part of those who want control over our lives.
Not that there is anything specifically "American" about this. It's hard to find any government (or corporation ;-) anywhere that doesn't behave similarly. It's just part of "the human condition", as the literary folks would express it.
Prediction: Legal measures to fix this situation will have no effect. The government will simply create a new secret agency with a new name, which will use different words to describe what they're doing, and it'll be just a continuation of the NSA's work. Does anyone have any accurate count of how many times this has already happened? (Likely not; some of them probably never became public. ;-)
your average European or American is generally pretty rational.
Then why does the average American support TSA and why is the average European against nuclear energy?
Note that "pretty rational" isn't exactly what you'd call a precise estimate. As a number, "pretty" basically means whatever the speaker/writer wanted it to mean (while probably hoping that most readers would misread it as "many" ;-).
If you assign to "pretty" the meaning "50th percentile", you might get a better feel for what the writer might have meant by the claim of "generally pretty rational" in the EU/US populations.
As George Carlin put it: "Think about the average person, how stupid they are, and realize that half of the people are stupider than that". And there's the old mass-media explanation that their material is usually written so the people at the 5th- or 10th-percentile in intelligence can understand it.
Sometimes it seems that the /. crowd has adopted the same approach ...
Motorola was caught red-handed sending *all* data you put on the phone back to Motorola over unencrypted HTTP. The data included passwords, pictures you have taken, etc. Motorola is now right next to Sony on my "do not trust" list.
You should maybe take into consideration, that this phone is really the 1st from Motorola where it's been owned by Google.
Well, maybe, but it might be a few years too late for that. I recall a few years back, when I stumbled across some warnings that the Google toolbar acted similarly. Out of curiosity, I set up a simple test. I created a honeypot directory, hidden behind an active index.html file, and linked a few files into it. I watched for a few days, and while the index.html file was downloaded at the usual couple thousand hits per day, the honeypot didn't show up in the server's access_log file.
Then I installed the Google Toolbar in a couple of browsers on another machine, and waited another day, and verified that the honeypot still had had no accesses. So far, so good. Then I went to one of those browsers, typed in the URL for the honeypot, got a list of its files in the browser's window, and started checking the access_log file over on the server.
After about 3 minutes, the access_log showed an access to the honeypot from a googlebot. I verified that the IP address was owned by google. A few minutes later, all the files in the honeypot had also been accessed by other googlebots. The only possible explanation for this is that the toolbar had reported the URL back to the google database.
I removed the Google toolbars, and have never installed them (or any other toolbar) in any browser that I use "for real" (as contrasted with those used for web testing). I verified that the honeypot was still being accessed by googlebots. I removed the honeypot.
A check a year later showed that the honeypot and its files were still findable via google. This tells me a lot about google's policy on such backdoors. If you trust anything that came with them to keep your data private, you may be in for some unpleasant surprises.
Don't worry; your cell phone's spell checker can generate the obscenities for you.
And that's even ignoring the fact that you'll need a lawyer to interpret the law, and decide which types of job will require the new tax, and which will not.
This is what worries me. Specifically, do we have a legal definition of that term "standardized" that I keep reading in association with this law?
Usually, in contrast with common speech (where "standard" means "the way we do it" ;-), the legal meaning of "standard" means following an official standards document published by an official standards agency. But I suspect that this might not be the definition in this law.
For example, suppose I wrote something a few years ago, which turns out to be useful to a new client, so I save them some billing time and just give them a copy. Does this qualify as a piece of "standardized" software simply because I've used it before? If so, how do I bill them? I ordinarily wouldn't charge for small pieces of code like this, or just bill for the time to test it on their system. Am I risking a huge fine or jail time if I don't charge them and send a few dollars to the state?
OTOH, most of my code is linked to libc, which is an implementation of an official, published standard (POSIX). So is everything linked to libc, including a little 5-line throwaway piece of C code, legally considered "standardized" because the executable contains libc routines?
Should I anticipate such little pieces of incidental code requiring thousands of dollars of legal and accounting fees to determine how to bill for them, in order to pay a few dollars in service tax? I can see legal and accounting work costing far more than my few minutes of billable time to locate a program in my library, compile it, and test it on the client's system.
You missed the point--he's saying that root access might one day no longer be necessary, ...
Actually, people have been claiming since the early days of unix (back in the 1970s) that root never has been "necessary". I've read a number of discussions triggered by such claims. They all reduce to the same conclusion: Yes, in a well-run computing environment, in which all vendors and users understood all the security issues and agreed on their solutions -- and implemented them all correctly -- the root id wouldn't be necessary. But we never have been anywhere near close to such an ideal. And until then, root is needed to cleanly fix the permission messes that our current practices so often produce.
I've been, uh, "discussing" an example of this on a web server where I'm the maintainer of one of the web sites. The site is actually replicated on my home machine and on another remote machine. I make changes on my home machine, then rsync the three machines when a change is working to my satisfaction. On the two remote machines, rsync has always produced a lot of bogus permission errors (while correctly copying the files). The reason is that some of the files are created by the web server, and are thus owned by the web server's id, not by mine. The code can enable world read/write permissions for everything, so the rsyncs all work. But due to the mismatch in ownership, rsync complains that it can't fix the permissions.
This is a problem for one important reason: Whenever the software gives such floods of bogus error messages, they bury the actual error messages, and teaches the users to ignore error messages (since all of them that you see are so bogus ;-). This isn't an ideal situation, if you want people to correctly spot problems and fix them.
It turns out that I can "fix" many of these problems if I spot them early enough. None of my login ids can fix them, since the logins don't match between the 3 machines and I don't have admin access to the others. But on my own machine, I can often use "sudo" to adjust permissions so that rsync won't produce so many bogus error messages. But I haven't stumbled across a way to fix them all.
I have occasionally persuaded (nicely ;-) an admin on one of the other machines to use a similar sudo to give me control of my own files, but they usually consider this a bother, and don't do it. I need to stay on good working terms with them, so I don't push it.
Anyway, I'd agree that root isn't, stricktly speaking, "necessary" right now. But it's often the least time-wasting solutions to all the annoying permission problems that typical machine setups produce. On a well-done server machine, owners of a web site would have group "www" permission, and could fix most such problems, but I don't think I've ever worked on a server that's run that way (except the servers that I run myself ;-). And so on.
I have an Android phone that at random times gives me what look like permission errors. I've investigated, but so far haven't found a solution other than rooting the gadget. I haven't actually done that, so once again, the machine's "security" setup is teaching me to ignore error messages, since they're usually sinkholes of time that I can't do anything about.
(I've never kept anything important on my phone for more than an hour or so, and treat it all as "transient" stuff that can disappear any second. I've occasionally worked on some apps, but tend to minimize testing on the phone itself due to the confusion of all the permission problems. Maybe this'll change some day. Or maybe I'll just stick with developing "apps" that run inside the browser, and continue with the mess that that "OS" is. ;-)
Interested folk might want to dig up the archaeologists' writings on several events that are precedents for this story. The best documented case is the flooding of the Mediterranean basin, but that was about 5 million years ago, before humans exist. A similar event occurred about 8000 years ago, when rising sea waters broke through the Straight of Bosporus, and flooded the Black sea, which was lower due to lack of water sources during the earlier ice age. There is also some evidence for an ice-age drying up of the Red Sea, and a similar flood that filled it. There is weak evidence that this has happened multiple times in the Black and Red Seas, as the ice sheets expanded and retreated.
So the idea that this may happen again in the future is not especially radical; it's just a repeat of something that has happened repeatedly. If you live near the channel that fills the basin, it's probably pretty dramatic for the months or years that it takes. In other areas, it's just a slow rise of the sea, flooding out your homes.