99% of everything reported as "AI" is actually just heuristics (advanced algorithms designed - usually by humans but sometime by random "guesses" like genetic algorithms - to achieve a particular task).
That's when whenever I hear about "AI" taking over, I have to laugh. We're still dicking about with the algorithmic equivalent of flapping our arms faster in order to fly.
They may have "seized" them, but unlike with physical property, how can they be sure they are "unspent" and still worth-ful?
What if, when they try to convert them to cash, they are told they've already appeared in the blockchain and have been "spent" elsewhere? Would that not be quite embarrassing? That, from under the noses of the FBI, someone has recovered all that money via an anonymous currency exchange and ran off with the proceeds?
I sincerely hope that they cash in the Bitcoins before something appears on the blockchain from that wallet. Double-spending is blocked, but that doesn't mean the FBI would be the first person to try to spend them. Especially not now they've put it on the news. Anyone could have a copy of that wallet.
What does that have to do with anything? Can you not read? This isn't about "lazy" people who don't get off their bum and work to earn money (hint: Never been unemployed in nearly 20 years of working life, not even for a second), this is about those who CHOOSE to be lazy when they don't need to do something (i.e. outside work, etc.).
Good luck with your heart attacks, stress-related disorders and working yourself to an early grave for no reward. Because, trust me, your pension won't be adequate whatever you do and on balance of all probability you'll die before you can enjoy retirement (that's what retirement and pensions basically are - a gamble on whether you'll live that long, funded by those of us who didn't but still paid in).
Go stress over your own payments. This is precisely what we're talking about here - living a stress-free life about things that don't matter and not buying into unnecessary "things" (like having more than one car, one of them a new Honda.... every car I've ever owned put together would cost me less than the laptop I'm writing this on - a work laptop - and yet I drive 30,000 miles a year just to work and back).
Stress yourself out worrying how to pay for expensive crap that you don't need and how you'll work to pay it. Or go sit in the garden and listen to the birds while doing without. That's what this post is about. I'm the latter.
Include source with the binary, in a non-executable section.
On first run, the machine builds the source (running as a very limited user) and compares the result against the rest of the binary. If it doesn't match, it simply ignores the binary supplied, replaces it with the new compiled version and signs it with a key unique to your own computer/compiler.
Of course, there are myriad problems here (not least that commercial software will never be released in that format), but that's the only way "to be sure". If in doubt, recompile from source. This is just an automation.
We already have the tools. PE and ELF already have sections we could use for this. We already do a lot of "multiple architectures stored in a single binary" magic (e.g. for MacOS, ELF allows you to do similar, etc.). We already have most of this in things like Software Restrictions policies, Authenticode, etc. it's just a case of going that one step further.
There's no reason that open-source software couldn't adopt a standard that - if you wish - you can just run the binary "as-is" (and it just ignores the source sections and works as currently), but if you have a system with the right option turned on, before a single byte of a program is executed it is compiled as a limited users from the source contained within it (in a way that produces constant binaries - it's not hard, we just prefer to debug with relevant build dates, etc. - this could be easily standardised to produce "consistent" builds if compiled on the same versions), checked against the resulting binary and/or just overwriting the binary (sometimes you'll have a newer compiler - swell - just ignore the "old" signed binary and replace with one generated from the binary's source contained within itself), signing the result and then "whitelisting" that particular signed binary. It only needs to be done once per executable per computer, won't take that long even for the largest software, and you get a "free" copy of the source too.
And while you're there, if you want to turn it off and just trust the binary (with source, and a message inside it detailing the checksum of that source, say, signed by FireFox Inc. or whatever), then you can just add that cert to your systems trusted lists and not worry about having to recompile every app.
To be honest, I don't get why open-source security distributions aren't already doing it. It would also solve an awful lot of "custom Makefile" problems that never get resolved. I spent hours the other week getting SDL to compile on ARM - sure, someone somewhere has done that for me but it's a pain in the arse involving editing Makefiles, changing options, patching configure scripts, etc. because "nobody ever does that, just use the binary".
It's also, if you are one, one of the best things about being introvert.
Most people associate introversion with shyness / being pathetic / being socially inadequate. Though I'm sure that's true of a lot of people (and probably even myself), it's not the sole cause.
The cause is that sitting quietly and thinking and just enjoying the "idleness" is MORE attractive to the introvert than being thrown into a social situation where they are forced to discuss, at length, things like the weather, or how shit their job is, or what that idiot on reality TV is doing at the moment, etc.
I find that being in a party (even a dinner party situation, as I've gotten older) is really one of the most stressful things I can find. Having to make small-talk (yuck). Having to be nice to people I don't particularly know well. Having to be doing SOMETHING all the time. Not being left alone ("come and dance", "don't sit there, come meet my friend", etc.).
You can spot this by putting an introvert near another. They will get on. They will get on by being able to talk about only things they find interesting (and if there's a common ground, they'll find it) and not have to worry about saying "something" all the time, no matter how inane the conversation. They'll still chat and discuss their lives but only the bits they are interested in, the positive notes of their lives, and strenuously try to find something interesting in the other person.
Put them in a room with a guy who just wants to talk about himself, gets pent up being quiet in a room, etc. and you'll see that both hate the situation.
It's enjoying the peace, the quiet, the lazily wandering around the house that allows people like myself to relax and enjoy life. No, I don't find rushing out to every friend's house relaxing. I'd invite them over, one-to-one, to watch a movie, or play some board games or read a book, or even just sit out in the garden chatting.
The problem comes from people who don't understand this: "How can you just sit there?" Easy. Watch. "Why don't you get out more and do lots of things?" Because I'm happy here. Doing little.
Is it laziness as in lack-of-effort-when-it's-required? No. It's a choice to NOT do some things when they aren't necessary at all. That feeling that most only get when they get home from a strenuous day at work and get to sit down for five minutes before they then rush off to do other things? I feel that a lot. Because those other things aren't as important as me relaxing and enjoying life.
We are blessed to live in a modern age where you don't have to work from the second you wake to the second you sleep, not get enough sleep anyway, and have to fight through the day against everything from nature to other people. Enjoy life while you have it. Because waiting for retirement to sit down and have even ten minutes to yourself is STUPENDOUSLY unhealthy and dangerous.
My weekend is coming up. I plan to do little. And that which I do plan to do, I've chosen to do, and it's quite non-strenuous (Jupiter is visible tomorrow night if I'm lucky with the weather - I'll go outside in the evening, set up a scope, and sit in the garden looking at stars... a really physically taxing hobby that I've discovered recently to be wonderfully engaging for my brain without being strenuous at all).
I'm sure there are people who would hate the idea of the whole concept and who don't even understand it. But, for some, it's the perfect way to live.
How is breaking a 2048-bit key encrypted by your password any less difficult than breaking a less-than-2048-bit password? (Hint: It's not. Quite the opposite).
The key is there to make it so that just the password, on its own, does not allow you to decrypt part of the data without also having the partition header (so getting a random sector off a storage device - say by doing magnetic history recovery if such a thing has ever existed - and having the password leaves you with NOTHING, you'd need the key sector as well).
Also, because your password is ALWAYS going to be less than 2048-bit, that's a way to ensure a decent level of security even if you use the same password on two machine (there is a nonce/salt value that does mean your password will not result in two identical keys on two otherwise-identical computers, so they can't use your laptop header to decrypt your PC even if they used the same password - this is a security feature by people who know what they are doing, if you haven't noticed).
This is not "the key". It's an encrypted (or salted+hashed) version of your key that is just as strong as every other sector on your hard drive but provides security features for non-2048-bit passwords that you wouldn't otherwise have. It does not weaken the encryption in any way, shape or form. If you could decrypt the key sector by brute-force, you could decrypt the rest of the hard drive with similar effort (so you lose NOTHING by having it).
So, please, stop talking nonsense.
Also, there is no correlation between this and the subject of the article, Truecrypt. Even if it did the same thing (I suspect it may, but it's not guaranteed), it's not "storing your key" at all. It's a misnomer to pretend it is or that it's in any way weakening security. If you can see the "key" inside that sector, you could see *any* decrypted data you wanted to anyway.
Rainbow tables, etc. apply to hash functions (and though it's possible salted hashes could be used in the same way to verify you have the correct key - which some encryption software does in certain places - your confusion between the two is most telling). And RT are defeated (pretty much) by large salted hashes and complex hash functions. They have no relevance here and - again - if the rainbow table helps you decrypt that initial key sector, it would help decrypt the drive WITHOUT that initial key sector anyway.
If you really think that something that obvious is as simple as "the key is in the first sector, let's just crack that sector", then you've not understood it at all. YOU STILL NEED TO KNOW THE PASSWORD or spend the same extraordinary effort breaking it to get anything at all. And with the initial sector being a random key - guess what? There's no predictable first boot sector, unlike if you just encrypted with a key (99% of Windows machines will have the same bootloader as everyone else so you KNOW when you've got the right key in one just sector of data - with an encrypted key in the first sector, you will *NOT* know if you have the right key without first then decrypting huge portions of the disk with that key and looking for plain-texts! That's a LOT of extra work added on - see.... security feature...).
And quite what you think putting it on different media will do, I don't know. That would be identical to just storing your "real key" on a USB thumb drive in an encrypted file protected by your password (because that's all it's doing).
This makes things better. It does not store "your key" but an encrypted copy of the key. That "encrypted" means it's just as hard to find that key as it would be ANY OTHER SECTOR on the disk. Except, as listed above, it provides a lot of advantages too.
Please get a clue before making blanket assertions like "It stores your key, so it's weakened". It's not. And this is why cryptography should NEVER be attempted by the amateur. What you think weakens the scheme actually makes it MUCH stronger.
Why do they need to even bother to stop it? If the US are doing things that we don't want them to do anyway, why go to ANY effort to help them do them legally? This is about removing our assistance that we give them to do it, not stopping them being able to do it.
Let them take the administrative burden (and I highly doubt they are monitoring every flight and every person on every flight, or else the agreement wouldn't have existed in the first place anyway), let them take the fall when the data is released by accident, and let it look to EU citizens like you're not caving in to the US (which is what we all accused them of when this agreement first appeared).
Nobody expects it to STOP the US stealing the data, but why should we help them do so at enormous expense to us? It's like piracy - the data is going to be stolen anyway, so why bother putting in a system of controls, contracts and everything else to our cost?
But, to be honest, this is nothing to do with data leaks or agreements. If you're not already reading this as the first step to broken EU/US relations, then you haven't been paying attention. That this happened is FAR MORE IMPORTANT than what's actually happened. No more easy rides for the US when they want something from us. (As it should be, because they never play ball when we ask for something).
Even Anglo-US relations are tenuous nowadays. You've just pissed off the French and the Germans. That's pretty much the three biggest economies/countries in the EU. There's not much of a step left until the whole of the EU has problems with the way you do things.
And then you can say bye-bye to us lending a hand for things like extraditions and terrorist bug-hunts. The EU followed the US into a pointless, long and very, very expensive "war" that never was (you can say what you want - it was NOT a war, legally or ethically - it's was a criminal hunt with guns in foreign countries), in the middle of massive economic troubles, and what did we see from it? Much stricter airport controls for ourselves, giving the US all our data (and getting nothing back), and lots and lots of expensive military action.
And what do we get back for our assistance? The US spied on us and then couldn't even be bothered to keep the information properly secret (Note: A whistleblower running around the world telling people all these things is TEN TIMES more damning than the fact that you spied them in the first place - it's just amateur). That's not how you treat an ally.
The biggest thing here is that the EU no longer wants to play ball with the US. If more things emerge, that distrust will deepen. You can play the "most important country in the world" card all you like, the fact is that the EU has more money in trade, and a much greater influence over other countries. It's going to hurt if the US continue to piss off the EU, and there aren't that many people in the EU who would care.
It's a question of how long before this affects US trade and before we're the ones imposing sanctions and forcing agreements on the US. Because, seriously guys, you might be big, but without the co-operation of your allies, you're in serious trouble.
It's their job to a) not blanket-grab millions of phone users of data in a random bug hunt but to apply "intelligence" and b) not to get caught doing so. They are spies. This is just terribly amateur. If you don't see that, then you're really missing the biggest thing - that's the problem more than ANYTHING else. So fucking amateur that it makes you look like a bunch of incompetents.
However, on a similar note, if you found out that the French authorities had a complete copy of your phone records which got publicly leaked (WikiLeaks-style, say), would you not be pissed? It could easily destroy your career, your life, your relationships, etc. (think: This might include the phone numbers of sex chat lines, and you might be a politician / teacher - nothing ILLEGAL in doing that, but would you want that being public knowledge after illegal collection of that data by a foreign entity not being held subject to the laws of YOUR country?).
Now think that that might include, say, phone calls made by the US ambassador to France while he was in the US. Now we're into REALLY serious shit that you can't even get in a court of law in the country.
What's more shocking is NOT that this data exists, or has been abused for purposes far beyond their remit, nor that they are that incompetent that it gets found out so easily (but that's pretty damning), but that - in order to "protect" the US, they have now incurred the wrath of quite a number of other countries allied to them and - should it come out into the public media that certain things were captured "accidentally" into that data - could well be the trigger to an international incident (read: War).
What if you found that a US ally like, say, the UK had complete records of every US citizen that the US did not give them (because a law prevents the US from doing so, and they thought it was just a blind hunt without purpose, and couldn't see why the UK would need that so they blocked it) but they stole in other ways and then managed to publish/leak to a newspaper in the UK?
And what if that info contained things like the phone records of major political figures? Or the phone calls made from Guantanamo Bay? Or what numbers were dialled in the Washington DC area when the UK queried why it join in fighting in the Middle East (or whatever?). It's not WHAT specifically was collected - it was why it was collected and what COULD be inside that that could easily trigger an international incident. And it has. And will continue to do so while things like this come out.
Fact is, there's being a spy - and that means NOT GETTING CAUGHT - and there's just going on a blind hunt through data "because you can" against the laws of a country you are allied to (who would have given you what you wanted if you'd asked).
Just how much co-operation do you think you will see next time you're trying to track a terrorist cell through France? It's counter-productive, and BAD SPYING. TERRIBLE SPYING. CRAP SPYING. And it's pissing off your allies.
"running IE" is the critical point here. I don't. Nor do my users. But you can't properly remove all traces of IE without problems. And, if anything, it just goes to show how IE is more-than-a-browser when it doesn't need to be (and actually causes problems being like that).
Was recently the subject of a blame-placing at work and was asked why we can't just use Internet Explorer (because of a single site-specific Firefox-only bug) and why we don't update INSTANTLY a major patch comes out without testing (because "Microsoft test these things", you know). It's ironic that, within a week of that, a patch is out, from Microsoft, that breaks IE's rendering of websites (including Google Apps, which we used heavily) and which should be one of the most heavily tested patches to come out of Microsoft.
There's still such a thing as choice and control. If you don't want choice and control, don't bother hiring an IT guy - just let Apple/Microsoft do what they want on your systems. If you do, hire IT people and let them worry about this and then LISTEN to their reasoning. We have testing/production, dev/stable, beta/release, etc. versioning for a reason.
And just because MS say it'll be fine and "there's workarounds" (well, a workaround is NOT a solution, as far as I'm concerned, only a way to turn stuff off that you might be using so you're not affected by the problem itself) does not mean it's not their fault. In fact, it makes it worse. "We know it's broke, but fuck you - do this to your systems or we don't give a shit" - for a web browser, which should be a separated process and application in ANY decent OS? No. Sorry.
IE was removed from my network desktops (sadly can't properly get rid it of for several reasons) many, many years ago and replaced with a standalone browser that can be updated independent of the version of the OS that's in use (or even the TYPE of OS that's in use, e.g. Linux, Mac, etc.).
As far as I'm concerned, still running IE on your desktop means you don't know any better. Notice the wording: It's not rude to home users who literally don't know any better and you don't expect them to, but it's quite damning to professionals who SHOULD know better - you can whine about ActiveX,.NET, Silverlight etc. being in your business all you want - the fact is that you should know better than to tie your company into a single third-party supplier. Even one as large as Microsoft or Apple.
I spent many years diagnosing blue-screens and all kinds of weird behaviour with ATI/AMD graphics chips. That history doesn't just go away, and I hear enough from my IT-literate friends to think that it's not swayed in the other direction significantly. We all have our opinion. To me, no amount of performance is worth data loss on a machine I might well be storing work on. And the benchmark differences just don't justify having to deal with that amount of hassle on any platform.
If every nanosecond mattered, that would be a different use-case and we're not talking consumer hardware any more. For the vast majority of home/business use, it doesn't matter that much.
When tired, sleep. When hungry, eat. When thirsty, drink. When in pain, don't mask the pain - find the cause.
Our bodies are self-sustaining machines based on multi-million-year-old designs that have been specifically chosen for their ability to detect, avoid and cope with dangers.
We're not perfect but, pretty much, the body knows exactly what it needs at any given time (there are instances where, if you ignore the warning signs, fight through, and you're close to destruction, the body will "flip" and want you to do stupid things - hypothermia is a good example here - but they are the exception rather than the rule). If you want an extreme example, watch pregnancy "cravings" - the body knows it needs some crap it's never needed in such proportions before, detects it in food (or other materials), and MAKES you want to eat it.
Telling people they need to sleep X amount of times or for X hours or whatever is just as ridiculous as spouting that we "need" 3 square meals a day (look into the history of that - it's a modern invention). Ancient documents almost all refer to "the second sleep" (i.e. people waking up in the middle of the night, even when artificial illumination was sparse and expensive, and doing things, then going back to bed) but that doesn't mean we should force our bodies to do what they don't want to do.
What we've done is taught ourselves to fight our bodies. We "need" to stay awake to go to work and perform against a rigorous and inflexible timetable set down by tradition. When we can't sleep, we force ourselves to try and frustrate our bodies and others rather than just getting up and doing what needs to be done. We've taught ourselves to wait until lunch/dinnertime to eat for fear of being "odd", and to then have a certain size meal (and then pig out on high-energy snacks in the meantime to fulfill our rumbling bellies).
We have conditioned our children to "stop running" (pretty much our primary genetic body advantage, that we have abandoned in modern life) and adults spend their lives walking and then have to perform an organised exercise to give that kind of boost to our bodies (and do you not feel good AFTER such an exertion because your body was craving it?) and we've taught ourselves to mask pain and discomfort wherever it strikes.
Not saying that we shouldn't do some things (i.e. basic hygiene and toilet-training, etc.) but we don't listen to our bodies any more.
When you hurt your ankle, keep your weight off it. Why? Because it hurts. If that starts to make your hips hurt, take it easy rather than forcing your body into pain. Don't tank up on painkillers "because you need to go to work/school" and make yourself walk on it. It hurts for a damn good reason, and we can't turn off pain for a damn good reason (admittedly, sometimes that goes wrong, but we know about those conditions and can detect and treat them as best we can).
There is no "rule" to keeping a human alive except "give it what it craves". You can go too far in the modern world (e.g. obesity, overindulgence, addiction, etc.) but that's also why we have a brain. To say "Hold on, this is wrong."
It's "wrong" to tell anyone how much sleep they "should be getting" (some people do only need 3 hours, others 12 or more, and it's not for anyone to force them otherwise), the same way that there is crap that my nation's health departments push such as "5 fruit/vegetables a day" (the recommendation is different in every country), "X glasses of water a day" (unnecessary - drink when thirsty unless you suffer from a very rare condition), etc. are there to encourage people not to over-indulge, not because it's a minimum requirement to sustain life. The whole vitamin / supplement industry is also preying on this social factor too (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24563590).
AMD and Intel will always get a win here or there, that's the nature of business. If you undercut someone enough to make a loss-leader product that's technically inferior, but sell it well enough, someone big will buy it so they can push out units. In the same way that no console is ever "state-of-the-art", there are a myriad decisions where the balance of value, cost, specifications and real-world performance combine to win the business.
But nVidia, it has to be said, has the lead generally. There are markets here and there and individual counter-examples, but nVidia really does the better job. As someone who owned one of the early 3DFX's, and through ATI Xpert@Work series and a myriad cards in between and through to the present day, I can't honestly consider non-nVidia things nowadays and I'll happily add £200 to a laptop price to get an equivalent model with nVidia graphics. And that's a laptop. And though I'm not your overclocker-ever-fps-counts-twitch-gaming gamer, I play a damn lot of games and spend a lot of money on them, and my preference is nVidia on a laptop (game anywhere with one machine, and even in a power cut, and not worry about 60/120fps pettiness) and run demanding OpenCL software.
The Steambox using nVidia would have been my only choice. It would be suspicious and laughed at if they'd said to use AMD or Intel on a gaming box with such a high recommended spec (even though a lot of the work on Linux drivers has been focused on getting everything out of Intel chipsets). Remember, "SteamBox" means nothing - it's just a collection of hardware that runs Steam OS so there will be AMD Steam Boxes from someone at some point (and they'll probably run AMD chips instead of Intel, too). They may be slightly cheaper and have slightly more bugs and slightly less performance but they won't be vastly different in terms of value for money if they are expect to be sold to people.
I would love Steam Box / SteamOS. I'd probably never install it on anything. That's from someone who was on Steam on day one and has got his ex-wife, girlfriend, brother, and even parents into having their own personal Steam accounts (whether that's 100 hrs on TF2 for my brother or 1000 hrs on Bookworm for my mum, or 10 hours on point-and-click adventure for my girlfriend). I wouldn't give them a SteamBox, because they don't need it with personal laptops, but I imagine they could be a serious contender if we can get the line "Which console will you buy this year? Playstation? Xbox? Wii? Or SteamBox?" into the public media.
However, the controller and the EXISTENCE of the OS is incredibly interesting. And the best bit is that a "Steam Box" doesn't exist as a thing... you'll get people making "overclocker's Steam Machines" and budget Raspberry-Pi-style "Nano-Steam Machines". THAT'S the exciting bit.
What card is in there is moot so long as people AREN'T able to tell just from playing on it. And AMD can play catch-up incredibly quickly if it becomes as popular as we hope. Hell, they only have to release one decent open driver for one particular chipset and EVERYONE will jump on it to make Steam Machines from it because it's the one with the open driver.
The biggest excitement? This is yet-another-device that will be in the home and may become a household name that will run Linux. Everyone has a TomTom or a Kindle or an Android device, and now we're pushing Linux into it's traditionally-regarded weak market. Once you get a household with Linux on everything else but the home PC, how long is it before the home PC doesn't even come with a Windows license anymore? Hell, I see people selling Windows/Android laptops and netbooks and tablet PC's already.
That's the exciting part, not that the only decent gaming cards are announced to go into a gaming computer that can use anything it likes.
Put DMZ options on the router to send all unsolicited traffic to that one PC's IP.
Watch what's being used and where it's coming from and where it's going.
To be honest, out of all the people who've ever come to me with a similar problem it's either a) a crap router, b) a crap ISP, c) Something on the machine/network talking OUT that's killing the connection (nothing external at all, e.g. P2P apps etc.), d) wireless connections being affected.
If you are genuinely changing your EXTERNAL IP (your internals mean nothing, your MAC means nothing), and it follows you that quickly, then YOU are broadcasting your location (or it's something internal to the network and nothing to do with packets from the Internet at all).
I know if I refresh my TF2 server list too often, my router can sometimes crap out.
Do some proper diagnosis. That means rather than guessing at something and trying things that have NO correlation (MAC addresses), that you follow Sherlock Holmes - when you have eliminated the possible, whatever remains must be the truth. Go through things and eliminate one at a time.
Put ONE device on the router. Change the router. Change the way you connect to the router. Look what's going out and coming in rather than guessing that you're being DDOS'd (I have yet to witness an actual DDOS in 15 years of network management). Or just talk to your damn ISP (who, almost certainly, will tell you there's nothing DDOS'ing you at all).
If you're getting a flood of recorded packets, you can see what they are, where they come from, and what prompts them and even how they have "found" you again. If you're just stabbing at solutions in the dark, then you're no better off at all.
And when you find out that this almost certainly is nothing to do with a deliberate external DDOS, come back here and apologise for wasting our time.
Junk tabloids are always more popular. In the UK, it's the Sun and the Mail and the Mirror and the Sport, etc.
The same way that the most popular shows on TV don't have much in the way of thinking involved - celeb shows and "reality" TV.
The barrier to entry is lower, so more people consume them. Unfortunately, it's pretty much a one-way downhill run from there.
You have to wonder what we're teaching our kids, especially in the celebrity areas. Let's all consume trivial information about people who got rich by not being able to sing but they can wiggle their ass suggestively.
I see people do that with mice still, because they don't know to adjust the sensitivity.
I reckon if you were to change that, you could get it nearer to a mouse without losing much of the slow-pinpoint at the other end.
And, let's be honest, like the Wii, this is NOT aimed at the hardcore professional gamer. For pissing about on TF2 from the sofa, that thing seems pretty good.
A legally-qualified friend of mine once told me that fax was officially regarded as a valid "service" in legal terms (i.e. you could send summons, court orders, etc. by it and count them as being served on someone).
There are rules for communications in legal terms, which basically say that if you replied to an email, then email is a valid form of service for you, and things like that, but fax had enjoys a special relationship with legal people for a long time. Hence some finance / legal departments will only accept things by fax sometimes, which although nonsensical in technical terms, has a good reason behind it.
I imagine the situation has changed with the advent of electronic court proceedings (according to what I was researching for preparation to sue my car insurance company, I am able to do virtually the entire case online nowadays, thanks to the UK Government Gateway authentication) but it still holds a few powers that courts will recognise but may not for things like email, messaging, etc.
I'm a glasses-wearer. I need them all day, every day, have done since I was 7 and the teachers realised I'd just memorised the words of all the school hymns rather than try to squint at the OHP projected words on the wall during assembly.
Fragility was a problem for me as a kid. Once I stopped getting into fights in the playground and playing rugby in PE, the number of times I've broken them is minimal. If I did those things now, I'd buy proper prescription sports goggles. Instead I buy glass lenses with flimsy metal frames from the "cheapest" aisle in the opticians I could find, and even paid for "coating" (which wore off after about six months). That was back before I took a holiday in 2003. Still wearing the same pair and still have the same prescription sunglasses I bought at the same time, and still have the "backup" pair that I got the new lenses put into just in case I break them. All of them are just fine.
Weight isn't something that I'd worry about. Tech is getting lighter and glasses distribute weight properly if they are any good. I would have more problems with them slipping down my nose than them hurting me, but weight would barely figure (have you weighed the circuit board to things like RPi? It's miniscule even though that's orders of magnitude too large). Weight of batteries is the only problem, solved by the marvellous addition of a 10p bit of wire.
Cleaning - fair enough. I do wipe them clean every day or so, it takes a second and the bottom corner of your shirt/sweater. I actually wipe my smartphone clean of fingerprints much more often (and ironically use glass-cleaning cloths to do so). But in terms of anything serious? No, it's not a hindrance that any existing glass / sunglass wearer doesn't already deal with without thinking.
Skin irritation - put a sticking plaster (band-aid?) or similar plastic insulation on the arms or anywhere they contact. My father-in-law coats his with clear nail varnish when he buys them to stop the contact triggering his metal allergy. He has to re-do them about once a year, if that.
None of them are killer problems. Killer problems are really that you don't want to live in Star Trek where every moron is checking his email while he crosses the road, or is recording kiddies from the school gates, or whatever. In terms of practicality, a glass-mounted computer is pretty good - especially once you can get them with prescription lenses and the usual array of frame choices.
There's a lot to moan about regarding Google Glass. The fact that it's a set of glasses isn't really one of them.
You're assuming the panels even survive that, let alone that the subsidies last that long.
And even if they do, will they actually do anything AFTER they've paid for themselves (which is the really interesting bit). Say they pay for their cost again for the next 10 years, then after 20 years of investment you'd have saved enough money on electricity to buy a few solar panels. There are much, much better and cost-effective ways to save/make money, and don't include legal problems with selling the house, reliance on government subsidies or hardware miraculously surviving unmaintained (or did you cost that in too?) for 20+ years out in direct sunlight without a single failure, fault or drop in efficiency.
Reminds me of Red Dwarf: "So, instead of the original charge and a possible sentence of two years in the brig they've been found guilty on another charge, and got an entirely different two years in the brig."
I've honestly never watched that tripe. It's like watching an old episode of Star Trek but without anywhere near as much budget or class or talent.
Watched one at a friends' house on Netflix recently, we found the first episode we could to show my girlfriend (who's Italian). It was damn hilarious. The acting was absolutely atrocious. The sword-fight was incredibly poor (if you thought the old Sinbad movies were bad, this is orders of magnitude worse, and no exaggeration).
It was a junky sci-fi thing that even kids would laugh at how bad it was. It was something to fill the 2 BBC channels we had back then. Somehow it gained a cult following (and not just because it's hilariously bad) like Star Trek and people swoon over it. It's awful.
And now that the "new" Doctor Who (which is at least a modern weekly sci-fi "psuedo-comedy" kind of thing) has awakened interest among teenagers, the BBC are milking the cash cow for whatever they can, after decades of threatening to cancel it, wiping old tapes, etc.
Nobody could seriously watch it except for nostalgia value or "gotta-watch-em-all" status.
The biggest use of it I ever had was - I needed to display a PC on two large external monitors connected over HDMI via 50m CAT6 runs on an extender. The extender for one of the displays broke.
Fortunately, I only needed to clone the image onto all the displays, so I put the RPi on the Cat6 behind the display, plugged it's HDMI out into the display, wired the cable to be Ethernet, had the RPi boot to a VNC viewer, and ran a VNC server on the machine that had the display.
It was small enough, low powered enough, on-hand at the time, and didn't take long to bodge. That was about it's only saving grace, but to be honest I had at least three backup plans that I nearly put into action anyway, it was such a faff.
My RPi from the very first batch has been gathering dust ever since I ran into a whole bunch of power and USB issues (the USB and SD port - or is it the Ethernet and SD, I forget? - both compete for bus resources and slagging any one of them can *silently* drop packets on the other). They tried to fix it but their debugging was non-existent for so long I stopped providing helpful data. About a year later, they put out a firmware fix that basically bodges things because the hardware design can't be changed.
Couple with initial compatibility problems resulting in sending my SD card to Broadcom themselves at the request of some RPi folks and then NEVER hearing anything back, not a dicky-bird, and still having the problems on even the latest firmwares, and the whole thing ended up in the attic. You honestly can't use a device that has problems that intermittent / unpredictable under heavy load, especially when all the interesting stuff will keep it under heavy load for the majority of its runtime.
Some day I'll knock it up to be a doorbell or some other non-critical electronic project but it's really just-another-IC to me at the moment, so it's gathering dust. Keeping it purely for future nostalgia value ("I remember I spent fucking months trying to get this to work!") and the fact that selling it isn't worth it because they cost so little.
Depending on your definition, they delivered the device they promised. Trouble is, it's next-to-useless for anything non-trivial in the homebrew-gadget department and don't even get me started on their selling this to schools (I work in schools - I showed everyone, from teachers to decision-makers to techies, right at the peak of the popularity of the launch when it was featuring on the BBC. We unanimously agreed that it was a nice gadget that, if you have the knowledge to use it with the educational resources provided - which is next to none - then you don't need it and can do much more interesting things on an ordinary PC).
Slashdot Mirror
99% of everything reported as "AI" is actually just heuristics (advanced algorithms designed - usually by humans but sometime by random "guesses" like genetic algorithms - to achieve a particular task).
That's when whenever I hear about "AI" taking over, I have to laugh. We're still dicking about with the algorithmic equivalent of flapping our arms faster in order to fly.
They may have "seized" them, but unlike with physical property, how can they be sure they are "unspent" and still worth-ful?
What if, when they try to convert them to cash, they are told they've already appeared in the blockchain and have been "spent" elsewhere? Would that not be quite embarrassing? That, from under the noses of the FBI, someone has recovered all that money via an anonymous currency exchange and ran off with the proceeds?
I sincerely hope that they cash in the Bitcoins before something appears on the blockchain from that wallet. Double-spending is blocked, but that doesn't mean the FBI would be the first person to try to spend them. Especially not now they've put it on the news. Anyone could have a copy of that wallet.
What does that have to do with anything? Can you not read? This isn't about "lazy" people who don't get off their bum and work to earn money (hint: Never been unemployed in nearly 20 years of working life, not even for a second), this is about those who CHOOSE to be lazy when they don't need to do something (i.e. outside work, etc.).
Good luck with your heart attacks, stress-related disorders and working yourself to an early grave for no reward. Because, trust me, your pension won't be adequate whatever you do and on balance of all probability you'll die before you can enjoy retirement (that's what retirement and pensions basically are - a gamble on whether you'll live that long, funded by those of us who didn't but still paid in).
Go stress over your own payments. This is precisely what we're talking about here - living a stress-free life about things that don't matter and not buying into unnecessary "things" (like having more than one car, one of them a new Honda.... every car I've ever owned put together would cost me less than the laptop I'm writing this on - a work laptop - and yet I drive 30,000 miles a year just to work and back).
Stress yourself out worrying how to pay for expensive crap that you don't need and how you'll work to pay it. Or go sit in the garden and listen to the birds while doing without. That's what this post is about. I'm the latter.
Include source with the binary, in a non-executable section.
On first run, the machine builds the source (running as a very limited user) and compares the result against the rest of the binary. If it doesn't match, it simply ignores the binary supplied, replaces it with the new compiled version and signs it with a key unique to your own computer/compiler.
Of course, there are myriad problems here (not least that commercial software will never be released in that format), but that's the only way "to be sure". If in doubt, recompile from source. This is just an automation.
We already have the tools. PE and ELF already have sections we could use for this. We already do a lot of "multiple architectures stored in a single binary" magic (e.g. for MacOS, ELF allows you to do similar, etc.). We already have most of this in things like Software Restrictions policies, Authenticode, etc. it's just a case of going that one step further.
There's no reason that open-source software couldn't adopt a standard that - if you wish - you can just run the binary "as-is" (and it just ignores the source sections and works as currently), but if you have a system with the right option turned on, before a single byte of a program is executed it is compiled as a limited users from the source contained within it (in a way that produces constant binaries - it's not hard, we just prefer to debug with relevant build dates, etc. - this could be easily standardised to produce "consistent" builds if compiled on the same versions), checked against the resulting binary and/or just overwriting the binary (sometimes you'll have a newer compiler - swell - just ignore the "old" signed binary and replace with one generated from the binary's source contained within itself), signing the result and then "whitelisting" that particular signed binary. It only needs to be done once per executable per computer, won't take that long even for the largest software, and you get a "free" copy of the source too.
And while you're there, if you want to turn it off and just trust the binary (with source, and a message inside it detailing the checksum of that source, say, signed by FireFox Inc. or whatever), then you can just add that cert to your systems trusted lists and not worry about having to recompile every app.
To be honest, I don't get why open-source security distributions aren't already doing it. It would also solve an awful lot of "custom Makefile" problems that never get resolved. I spent hours the other week getting SDL to compile on ARM - sure, someone somewhere has done that for me but it's a pain in the arse involving editing Makefiles, changing options, patching configure scripts, etc. because "nobody ever does that, just use the binary".
It's also, if you are one, one of the best things about being introvert.
Most people associate introversion with shyness / being pathetic / being socially inadequate. Though I'm sure that's true of a lot of people (and probably even myself), it's not the sole cause.
The cause is that sitting quietly and thinking and just enjoying the "idleness" is MORE attractive to the introvert than being thrown into a social situation where they are forced to discuss, at length, things like the weather, or how shit their job is, or what that idiot on reality TV is doing at the moment, etc.
I find that being in a party (even a dinner party situation, as I've gotten older) is really one of the most stressful things I can find. Having to make small-talk (yuck). Having to be nice to people I don't particularly know well. Having to be doing SOMETHING all the time. Not being left alone ("come and dance", "don't sit there, come meet my friend", etc.).
You can spot this by putting an introvert near another. They will get on. They will get on by being able to talk about only things they find interesting (and if there's a common ground, they'll find it) and not have to worry about saying "something" all the time, no matter how inane the conversation. They'll still chat and discuss their lives but only the bits they are interested in, the positive notes of their lives, and strenuously try to find something interesting in the other person.
Put them in a room with a guy who just wants to talk about himself, gets pent up being quiet in a room, etc. and you'll see that both hate the situation.
It's enjoying the peace, the quiet, the lazily wandering around the house that allows people like myself to relax and enjoy life. No, I don't find rushing out to every friend's house relaxing. I'd invite them over, one-to-one, to watch a movie, or play some board games or read a book, or even just sit out in the garden chatting.
The problem comes from people who don't understand this: "How can you just sit there?" Easy. Watch.
"Why don't you get out more and do lots of things?" Because I'm happy here. Doing little.
Is it laziness as in lack-of-effort-when-it's-required? No. It's a choice to NOT do some things when they aren't necessary at all. That feeling that most only get when they get home from a strenuous day at work and get to sit down for five minutes before they then rush off to do other things? I feel that a lot. Because those other things aren't as important as me relaxing and enjoying life.
We are blessed to live in a modern age where you don't have to work from the second you wake to the second you sleep, not get enough sleep anyway, and have to fight through the day against everything from nature to other people. Enjoy life while you have it. Because waiting for retirement to sit down and have even ten minutes to yourself is STUPENDOUSLY unhealthy and dangerous.
My weekend is coming up. I plan to do little. And that which I do plan to do, I've chosen to do, and it's quite non-strenuous (Jupiter is visible tomorrow night if I'm lucky with the weather - I'll go outside in the evening, set up a scope, and sit in the garden looking at stars... a really physically taxing hobby that I've discovered recently to be wonderfully engaging for my brain without being strenuous at all).
I'm sure there are people who would hate the idea of the whole concept and who don't even understand it. But, for some, it's the perfect way to live.
How is breaking a 2048-bit key encrypted by your password any less difficult than breaking a less-than-2048-bit password? (Hint: It's not. Quite the opposite).
The key is there to make it so that just the password, on its own, does not allow you to decrypt part of the data without also having the partition header (so getting a random sector off a storage device - say by doing magnetic history recovery if such a thing has ever existed - and having the password leaves you with NOTHING, you'd need the key sector as well).
Also, because your password is ALWAYS going to be less than 2048-bit, that's a way to ensure a decent level of security even if you use the same password on two machine (there is a nonce/salt value that does mean your password will not result in two identical keys on two otherwise-identical computers, so they can't use your laptop header to decrypt your PC even if they used the same password - this is a security feature by people who know what they are doing, if you haven't noticed).
This is not "the key". It's an encrypted (or salted+hashed) version of your key that is just as strong as every other sector on your hard drive but provides security features for non-2048-bit passwords that you wouldn't otherwise have. It does not weaken the encryption in any way, shape or form. If you could decrypt the key sector by brute-force, you could decrypt the rest of the hard drive with similar effort (so you lose NOTHING by having it).
So, please, stop talking nonsense.
Also, there is no correlation between this and the subject of the article, Truecrypt. Even if it did the same thing (I suspect it may, but it's not guaranteed), it's not "storing your key" at all. It's a misnomer to pretend it is or that it's in any way weakening security. If you can see the "key" inside that sector, you could see *any* decrypted data you wanted to anyway.
Rainbow tables, etc. apply to hash functions (and though it's possible salted hashes could be used in the same way to verify you have the correct key - which some encryption software does in certain places - your confusion between the two is most telling). And RT are defeated (pretty much) by large salted hashes and complex hash functions. They have no relevance here and - again - if the rainbow table helps you decrypt that initial key sector, it would help decrypt the drive WITHOUT that initial key sector anyway.
If you really think that something that obvious is as simple as "the key is in the first sector, let's just crack that sector", then you've not understood it at all. YOU STILL NEED TO KNOW THE PASSWORD or spend the same extraordinary effort breaking it to get anything at all. And with the initial sector being a random key - guess what? There's no predictable first boot sector, unlike if you just encrypted with a key (99% of Windows machines will have the same bootloader as everyone else so you KNOW when you've got the right key in one just sector of data - with an encrypted key in the first sector, you will *NOT* know if you have the right key without first then decrypting huge portions of the disk with that key and looking for plain-texts! That's a LOT of extra work added on - see.... security feature...).
And quite what you think putting it on different media will do, I don't know. That would be identical to just storing your "real key" on a USB thumb drive in an encrypted file protected by your password (because that's all it's doing).
This makes things better. It does not store "your key" but an encrypted copy of the key. That "encrypted" means it's just as hard to find that key as it would be ANY OTHER SECTOR on the disk. Except, as listed above, it provides a lot of advantages too.
Please get a clue before making blanket assertions like "It stores your key, so it's weakened". It's not. And this is why cryptography should NEVER be attempted by the amateur. What you think weakens the scheme actually makes it MUCH stronger.
Er. No. It doesn't.
Why do they need to even bother to stop it? If the US are doing things that we don't want them to do anyway, why go to ANY effort to help them do them legally? This is about removing our assistance that we give them to do it, not stopping them being able to do it.
Let them take the administrative burden (and I highly doubt they are monitoring every flight and every person on every flight, or else the agreement wouldn't have existed in the first place anyway), let them take the fall when the data is released by accident, and let it look to EU citizens like you're not caving in to the US (which is what we all accused them of when this agreement first appeared).
Nobody expects it to STOP the US stealing the data, but why should we help them do so at enormous expense to us? It's like piracy - the data is going to be stolen anyway, so why bother putting in a system of controls, contracts and everything else to our cost?
But, to be honest, this is nothing to do with data leaks or agreements. If you're not already reading this as the first step to broken EU/US relations, then you haven't been paying attention. That this happened is FAR MORE IMPORTANT than what's actually happened. No more easy rides for the US when they want something from us. (As it should be, because they never play ball when we ask for something).
Even Anglo-US relations are tenuous nowadays. You've just pissed off the French and the Germans. That's pretty much the three biggest economies/countries in the EU. There's not much of a step left until the whole of the EU has problems with the way you do things.
And then you can say bye-bye to us lending a hand for things like extraditions and terrorist bug-hunts. The EU followed the US into a pointless, long and very, very expensive "war" that never was (you can say what you want - it was NOT a war, legally or ethically - it's was a criminal hunt with guns in foreign countries), in the middle of massive economic troubles, and what did we see from it? Much stricter airport controls for ourselves, giving the US all our data (and getting nothing back), and lots and lots of expensive military action.
And what do we get back for our assistance? The US spied on us and then couldn't even be bothered to keep the information properly secret (Note: A whistleblower running around the world telling people all these things is TEN TIMES more damning than the fact that you spied them in the first place - it's just amateur). That's not how you treat an ally.
The biggest thing here is that the EU no longer wants to play ball with the US. If more things emerge, that distrust will deepen. You can play the "most important country in the world" card all you like, the fact is that the EU has more money in trade, and a much greater influence over other countries. It's going to hurt if the US continue to piss off the EU, and there aren't that many people in the EU who would care.
It's a question of how long before this affects US trade and before we're the ones imposing sanctions and forcing agreements on the US. Because, seriously guys, you might be big, but without the co-operation of your allies, you're in serious trouble.
It's their job to a) not blanket-grab millions of phone users of data in a random bug hunt but to apply "intelligence" and b) not to get caught doing so. They are spies. This is just terribly amateur. If you don't see that, then you're really missing the biggest thing - that's the problem more than ANYTHING else. So fucking amateur that it makes you look like a bunch of incompetents.
However, on a similar note, if you found out that the French authorities had a complete copy of your phone records which got publicly leaked (WikiLeaks-style, say), would you not be pissed? It could easily destroy your career, your life, your relationships, etc. (think: This might include the phone numbers of sex chat lines, and you might be a politician / teacher - nothing ILLEGAL in doing that, but would you want that being public knowledge after illegal collection of that data by a foreign entity not being held subject to the laws of YOUR country?).
Now think that that might include, say, phone calls made by the US ambassador to France while he was in the US. Now we're into REALLY serious shit that you can't even get in a court of law in the country.
What's more shocking is NOT that this data exists, or has been abused for purposes far beyond their remit, nor that they are that incompetent that it gets found out so easily (but that's pretty damning), but that - in order to "protect" the US, they have now incurred the wrath of quite a number of other countries allied to them and - should it come out into the public media that certain things were captured "accidentally" into that data - could well be the trigger to an international incident (read: War).
What if you found that a US ally like, say, the UK had complete records of every US citizen that the US did not give them (because a law prevents the US from doing so, and they thought it was just a blind hunt without purpose, and couldn't see why the UK would need that so they blocked it) but they stole in other ways and then managed to publish/leak to a newspaper in the UK?
And what if that info contained things like the phone records of major political figures? Or the phone calls made from Guantanamo Bay? Or what numbers were dialled in the Washington DC area when the UK queried why it join in fighting in the Middle East (or whatever?). It's not WHAT specifically was collected - it was why it was collected and what COULD be inside that that could easily trigger an international incident. And it has. And will continue to do so while things like this come out.
Fact is, there's being a spy - and that means NOT GETTING CAUGHT - and there's just going on a blind hunt through data "because you can" against the laws of a country you are allied to (who would have given you what you wanted if you'd asked).
Just how much co-operation do you think you will see next time you're trying to track a terrorist cell through France? It's counter-productive, and BAD SPYING. TERRIBLE SPYING. CRAP SPYING. And it's pissing off your allies.
Can my users see and/or run IE?
No.
"running IE" is the critical point here. I don't. Nor do my users. But you can't properly remove all traces of IE without problems. And, if anything, it just goes to show how IE is more-than-a-browser when it doesn't need to be (and actually causes problems being like that).
Agreed.
Was recently the subject of a blame-placing at work and was asked why we can't just use Internet Explorer (because of a single site-specific Firefox-only bug) and why we don't update INSTANTLY a major patch comes out without testing (because "Microsoft test these things", you know). It's ironic that, within a week of that, a patch is out, from Microsoft, that breaks IE's rendering of websites (including Google Apps, which we used heavily) and which should be one of the most heavily tested patches to come out of Microsoft.
There's still such a thing as choice and control. If you don't want choice and control, don't bother hiring an IT guy - just let Apple/Microsoft do what they want on your systems. If you do, hire IT people and let them worry about this and then LISTEN to their reasoning. We have testing/production, dev/stable, beta/release, etc. versioning for a reason.
And just because MS say it'll be fine and "there's workarounds" (well, a workaround is NOT a solution, as far as I'm concerned, only a way to turn stuff off that you might be using so you're not affected by the problem itself) does not mean it's not their fault. In fact, it makes it worse. "We know it's broke, but fuck you - do this to your systems or we don't give a shit" - for a web browser, which should be a separated process and application in ANY decent OS? No. Sorry.
IE was removed from my network desktops (sadly can't properly get rid it of for several reasons) many, many years ago and replaced with a standalone browser that can be updated independent of the version of the OS that's in use (or even the TYPE of OS that's in use, e.g. Linux, Mac, etc.).
As far as I'm concerned, still running IE on your desktop means you don't know any better. Notice the wording: It's not rude to home users who literally don't know any better and you don't expect them to, but it's quite damning to professionals who SHOULD know better - you can whine about ActiveX, .NET, Silverlight etc. being in your business all you want - the fact is that you should know better than to tie your company into a single third-party supplier. Even one as large as Microsoft or Apple.
I spent many years diagnosing blue-screens and all kinds of weird behaviour with ATI/AMD graphics chips. That history doesn't just go away, and I hear enough from my IT-literate friends to think that it's not swayed in the other direction significantly. We all have our opinion. To me, no amount of performance is worth data loss on a machine I might well be storing work on. And the benchmark differences just don't justify having to deal with that amount of hassle on any platform.
If every nanosecond mattered, that would be a different use-case and we're not talking consumer hardware any more. For the vast majority of home/business use, it doesn't matter that much.
When tired, sleep.
When hungry, eat.
When thirsty, drink.
When in pain, don't mask the pain - find the cause.
Our bodies are self-sustaining machines based on multi-million-year-old designs that have been specifically chosen for their ability to detect, avoid and cope with dangers.
We're not perfect but, pretty much, the body knows exactly what it needs at any given time (there are instances where, if you ignore the warning signs, fight through, and you're close to destruction, the body will "flip" and want you to do stupid things - hypothermia is a good example here - but they are the exception rather than the rule). If you want an extreme example, watch pregnancy "cravings" - the body knows it needs some crap it's never needed in such proportions before, detects it in food (or other materials), and MAKES you want to eat it.
Telling people they need to sleep X amount of times or for X hours or whatever is just as ridiculous as spouting that we "need" 3 square meals a day (look into the history of that - it's a modern invention). Ancient documents almost all refer to "the second sleep" (i.e. people waking up in the middle of the night, even when artificial illumination was sparse and expensive, and doing things, then going back to bed) but that doesn't mean we should force our bodies to do what they don't want to do.
What we've done is taught ourselves to fight our bodies. We "need" to stay awake to go to work and perform against a rigorous and inflexible timetable set down by tradition. When we can't sleep, we force ourselves to try and frustrate our bodies and others rather than just getting up and doing what needs to be done. We've taught ourselves to wait until lunch/dinnertime to eat for fear of being "odd", and to then have a certain size meal (and then pig out on high-energy snacks in the meantime to fulfill our rumbling bellies).
We have conditioned our children to "stop running" (pretty much our primary genetic body advantage, that we have abandoned in modern life) and adults spend their lives walking and then have to perform an organised exercise to give that kind of boost to our bodies (and do you not feel good AFTER such an exertion because your body was craving it?) and we've taught ourselves to mask pain and discomfort wherever it strikes.
Not saying that we shouldn't do some things (i.e. basic hygiene and toilet-training, etc.) but we don't listen to our bodies any more.
When you hurt your ankle, keep your weight off it. Why? Because it hurts. If that starts to make your hips hurt, take it easy rather than forcing your body into pain. Don't tank up on painkillers "because you need to go to work/school" and make yourself walk on it. It hurts for a damn good reason, and we can't turn off pain for a damn good reason (admittedly, sometimes that goes wrong, but we know about those conditions and can detect and treat them as best we can).
There is no "rule" to keeping a human alive except "give it what it craves". You can go too far in the modern world (e.g. obesity, overindulgence, addiction, etc.) but that's also why we have a brain. To say "Hold on, this is wrong."
It's "wrong" to tell anyone how much sleep they "should be getting" (some people do only need 3 hours, others 12 or more, and it's not for anyone to force them otherwise), the same way that there is crap that my nation's health departments push such as "5 fruit/vegetables a day" (the recommendation is different in every country), "X glasses of water a day" (unnecessary - drink when thirsty unless you suffer from a very rare condition), etc. are there to encourage people not to over-indulge, not because it's a minimum requirement to sustain life. The whole vitamin / supplement industry is also preying on this social factor too (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24563590).
Do what your body asks of you.
AMD and Intel will always get a win here or there, that's the nature of business. If you undercut someone enough to make a loss-leader product that's technically inferior, but sell it well enough, someone big will buy it so they can push out units. In the same way that no console is ever "state-of-the-art", there are a myriad decisions where the balance of value, cost, specifications and real-world performance combine to win the business.
But nVidia, it has to be said, has the lead generally. There are markets here and there and individual counter-examples, but nVidia really does the better job. As someone who owned one of the early 3DFX's, and through ATI Xpert@Work series and a myriad cards in between and through to the present day, I can't honestly consider non-nVidia things nowadays and I'll happily add £200 to a laptop price to get an equivalent model with nVidia graphics. And that's a laptop. And though I'm not your overclocker-ever-fps-counts-twitch-gaming gamer, I play a damn lot of games and spend a lot of money on them, and my preference is nVidia on a laptop (game anywhere with one machine, and even in a power cut, and not worry about 60/120fps pettiness) and run demanding OpenCL software.
The Steambox using nVidia would have been my only choice. It would be suspicious and laughed at if they'd said to use AMD or Intel on a gaming box with such a high recommended spec (even though a lot of the work on Linux drivers has been focused on getting everything out of Intel chipsets). Remember, "SteamBox" means nothing - it's just a collection of hardware that runs Steam OS so there will be AMD Steam Boxes from someone at some point (and they'll probably run AMD chips instead of Intel, too). They may be slightly cheaper and have slightly more bugs and slightly less performance but they won't be vastly different in terms of value for money if they are expect to be sold to people.
I would love Steam Box / SteamOS. I'd probably never install it on anything. That's from someone who was on Steam on day one and has got his ex-wife, girlfriend, brother, and even parents into having their own personal Steam accounts (whether that's 100 hrs on TF2 for my brother or 1000 hrs on Bookworm for my mum, or 10 hours on point-and-click adventure for my girlfriend). I wouldn't give them a SteamBox, because they don't need it with personal laptops, but I imagine they could be a serious contender if we can get the line "Which console will you buy this year? Playstation? Xbox? Wii? Or SteamBox?" into the public media.
However, the controller and the EXISTENCE of the OS is incredibly interesting. And the best bit is that a "Steam Box" doesn't exist as a thing... you'll get people making "overclocker's Steam Machines" and budget Raspberry-Pi-style "Nano-Steam Machines". THAT'S the exciting bit.
What card is in there is moot so long as people AREN'T able to tell just from playing on it. And AMD can play catch-up incredibly quickly if it becomes as popular as we hope. Hell, they only have to release one decent open driver for one particular chipset and EVERYONE will jump on it to make Steam Machines from it because it's the one with the open driver.
The biggest excitement? This is yet-another-device that will be in the home and may become a household name that will run Linux. Everyone has a TomTom or a Kindle or an Android device, and now we're pushing Linux into it's traditionally-regarded weak market. Once you get a household with Linux on everything else but the home PC, how long is it before the home PC doesn't even come with a Windows license anymore? Hell, I see people selling Windows/Android laptops and netbooks and tablet PC's already.
That's the exciting part, not that the only decent gaming cards are announced to go into a gaming computer that can use anything it likes.
Software geek?
Put ONE machine on your router.
Load up Wireshark.
Put DMZ options on the router to send all unsolicited traffic to that one PC's IP.
Watch what's being used and where it's coming from and where it's going.
To be honest, out of all the people who've ever come to me with a similar problem it's either a) a crap router, b) a crap ISP, c) Something on the machine/network talking OUT that's killing the connection (nothing external at all, e.g. P2P apps etc.), d) wireless connections being affected.
If you are genuinely changing your EXTERNAL IP (your internals mean nothing, your MAC means nothing), and it follows you that quickly, then YOU are broadcasting your location (or it's something internal to the network and nothing to do with packets from the Internet at all).
I know if I refresh my TF2 server list too often, my router can sometimes crap out.
Do some proper diagnosis. That means rather than guessing at something and trying things that have NO correlation (MAC addresses), that you follow Sherlock Holmes - when you have eliminated the possible, whatever remains must be the truth. Go through things and eliminate one at a time.
Put ONE device on the router. Change the router. Change the way you connect to the router. Look what's going out and coming in rather than guessing that you're being DDOS'd (I have yet to witness an actual DDOS in 15 years of network management). Or just talk to your damn ISP (who, almost certainly, will tell you there's nothing DDOS'ing you at all).
If you're getting a flood of recorded packets, you can see what they are, where they come from, and what prompts them and even how they have "found" you again. If you're just stabbing at solutions in the dark, then you're no better off at all.
And when you find out that this almost certainly is nothing to do with a deliberate external DDOS, come back here and apologise for wasting our time.
Junk tabloids are always more popular. In the UK, it's the Sun and the Mail and the Mirror and the Sport, etc.
The same way that the most popular shows on TV don't have much in the way of thinking involved - celeb shows and "reality" TV.
The barrier to entry is lower, so more people consume them. Unfortunately, it's pretty much a one-way downhill run from there.
You have to wonder what we're teaching our kids, especially in the celebrity areas. Let's all consume trivial information about people who got rich by not being able to sing but they can wiggle their ass suggestively.
I see people do that with mice still, because they don't know to adjust the sensitivity.
I reckon if you were to change that, you could get it nearer to a mouse without losing much of the slow-pinpoint at the other end.
And, let's be honest, like the Wii, this is NOT aimed at the hardcore professional gamer. For pissing about on TF2 from the sofa, that thing seems pretty good.
A legally-qualified friend of mine once told me that fax was officially regarded as a valid "service" in legal terms (i.e. you could send summons, court orders, etc. by it and count them as being served on someone).
There are rules for communications in legal terms, which basically say that if you replied to an email, then email is a valid form of service for you, and things like that, but fax had enjoys a special relationship with legal people for a long time. Hence some finance / legal departments will only accept things by fax sometimes, which although nonsensical in technical terms, has a good reason behind it.
I imagine the situation has changed with the advent of electronic court proceedings (according to what I was researching for preparation to sue my car insurance company, I am able to do virtually the entire case online nowadays, thanks to the UK Government Gateway authentication) but it still holds a few powers that courts will recognise but may not for things like email, messaging, etc.
Only if does it in English could have.
I'm a glasses-wearer. I need them all day, every day, have done since I was 7 and the teachers realised I'd just memorised the words of all the school hymns rather than try to squint at the OHP projected words on the wall during assembly.
Fragility was a problem for me as a kid. Once I stopped getting into fights in the playground and playing rugby in PE, the number of times I've broken them is minimal. If I did those things now, I'd buy proper prescription sports goggles. Instead I buy glass lenses with flimsy metal frames from the "cheapest" aisle in the opticians I could find, and even paid for "coating" (which wore off after about six months). That was back before I took a holiday in 2003. Still wearing the same pair and still have the same prescription sunglasses I bought at the same time, and still have the "backup" pair that I got the new lenses put into just in case I break them. All of them are just fine.
Weight isn't something that I'd worry about. Tech is getting lighter and glasses distribute weight properly if they are any good. I would have more problems with them slipping down my nose than them hurting me, but weight would barely figure (have you weighed the circuit board to things like RPi? It's miniscule even though that's orders of magnitude too large). Weight of batteries is the only problem, solved by the marvellous addition of a 10p bit of wire.
Cleaning - fair enough. I do wipe them clean every day or so, it takes a second and the bottom corner of your shirt/sweater. I actually wipe my smartphone clean of fingerprints much more often (and ironically use glass-cleaning cloths to do so). But in terms of anything serious? No, it's not a hindrance that any existing glass / sunglass wearer doesn't already deal with without thinking.
Skin irritation - put a sticking plaster (band-aid?) or similar plastic insulation on the arms or anywhere they contact. My father-in-law coats his with clear nail varnish when he buys them to stop the contact triggering his metal allergy. He has to re-do them about once a year, if that.
None of them are killer problems. Killer problems are really that you don't want to live in Star Trek where every moron is checking his email while he crosses the road, or is recording kiddies from the school gates, or whatever. In terms of practicality, a glass-mounted computer is pretty good - especially once you can get them with prescription lenses and the usual array of frame choices.
There's a lot to moan about regarding Google Glass. The fact that it's a set of glasses isn't really one of them.
10 years is ten years.
You're assuming the panels even survive that, let alone that the subsidies last that long.
And even if they do, will they actually do anything AFTER they've paid for themselves (which is the really interesting bit). Say they pay for their cost again for the next 10 years, then after 20 years of investment you'd have saved enough money on electricity to buy a few solar panels. There are much, much better and cost-effective ways to save/make money, and don't include legal problems with selling the house, reliance on government subsidies or hardware miraculously surviving unmaintained (or did you cost that in too?) for 20+ years out in direct sunlight without a single failure, fault or drop in efficiency.
Reminds me of Red Dwarf: "So, instead of the original charge and a possible sentence of two years in the brig they've been found guilty on another charge, and got an entirely different two years in the brig."
I'm a brit and a geek.
I've honestly never watched that tripe. It's like watching an old episode of Star Trek but without anywhere near as much budget or class or talent.
Watched one at a friends' house on Netflix recently, we found the first episode we could to show my girlfriend (who's Italian). It was damn hilarious. The acting was absolutely atrocious. The sword-fight was incredibly poor (if you thought the old Sinbad movies were bad, this is orders of magnitude worse, and no exaggeration).
It was a junky sci-fi thing that even kids would laugh at how bad it was. It was something to fill the 2 BBC channels we had back then. Somehow it gained a cult following (and not just because it's hilariously bad) like Star Trek and people swoon over it. It's awful.
And now that the "new" Doctor Who (which is at least a modern weekly sci-fi "psuedo-comedy" kind of thing) has awakened interest among teenagers, the BBC are milking the cash cow for whatever they can, after decades of threatening to cancel it, wiping old tapes, etc.
Nobody could seriously watch it except for nostalgia value or "gotta-watch-em-all" status.
Do yourself a favour - don't.
Oh, forgot to say.
The biggest use of it I ever had was - I needed to display a PC on two large external monitors connected over HDMI via 50m CAT6 runs on an extender. The extender for one of the displays broke.
Fortunately, I only needed to clone the image onto all the displays, so I put the RPi on the Cat6 behind the display, plugged it's HDMI out into the display, wired the cable to be Ethernet, had the RPi boot to a VNC viewer, and ran a VNC server on the machine that had the display.
It was small enough, low powered enough, on-hand at the time, and didn't take long to bodge. That was about it's only saving grace, but to be honest I had at least three backup plans that I nearly put into action anyway, it was such a faff.
Same here.
My RPi from the very first batch has been gathering dust ever since I ran into a whole bunch of power and USB issues (the USB and SD port - or is it the Ethernet and SD, I forget? - both compete for bus resources and slagging any one of them can *silently* drop packets on the other). They tried to fix it but their debugging was non-existent for so long I stopped providing helpful data. About a year later, they put out a firmware fix that basically bodges things because the hardware design can't be changed.
Couple with initial compatibility problems resulting in sending my SD card to Broadcom themselves at the request of some RPi folks and then NEVER hearing anything back, not a dicky-bird, and still having the problems on even the latest firmwares, and the whole thing ended up in the attic. You honestly can't use a device that has problems that intermittent / unpredictable under heavy load, especially when all the interesting stuff will keep it under heavy load for the majority of its runtime.
Some day I'll knock it up to be a doorbell or some other non-critical electronic project but it's really just-another-IC to me at the moment, so it's gathering dust. Keeping it purely for future nostalgia value ("I remember I spent fucking months trying to get this to work!") and the fact that selling it isn't worth it because they cost so little.
Depending on your definition, they delivered the device they promised. Trouble is, it's next-to-useless for anything non-trivial in the homebrew-gadget department and don't even get me started on their selling this to schools (I work in schools - I showed everyone, from teachers to decision-makers to techies, right at the peak of the popularity of the launch when it was featuring on the BBC. We unanimously agreed that it was a nice gadget that, if you have the knowledge to use it with the educational resources provided - which is next to none - then you don't need it and can do much more interesting things on an ordinary PC).