Yeah....if the aviation industry actually had reason to believe there is actual interference from such devices. But they don't. Their bullshit warnings are more fear-mongering than anything.
I've worked in the airline industry before -- it's not fear mongering, it's more that they can't definitely say it won't experience problems. So therefore, they just go with the ban.
Airlines are extremely risk averse, and in the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they're going to come down on the side of caution. The engineers in that industry will always go where the least risk is.
It's not some conspiracy to deprive you of Angry Birds. They really don't know everything which could go wrong, and since it's an FAA policy, they stick with it. If the FAA ever says "OK, go ahead, we've tested it and it's safe", they'll change.
If you think the airlines would change without approval from the FAA, you're wrong.
The problem is the sheer scale of the number of on-board electronics and available consumer devices. They simply don't know.
Wow. That is truly sad. Well, I guess I can stop thinking about driving through New England anytime soon... it's beginning to sound like the East Germany of yore.
Minor nitpick/personal view.. but I have a very hard time absorbing stuff when dealing with large numbers (how man hours are in a year.. I really don't have a clue).
Well, 2000 hours gives you 40 hours/week for 50 weeks.
had exactly the same product been made by HP or Dell
Well, therein lies the rub.
We all saw the HP tablet -- it was a dog that eventually HP themselves was selling for about $99 to their employees to clear it out.
My brother's tiny little off-name Android tablet is cool enough, but has a fairly low-res display and seemed to have some warts (the clock stops when it's turned off, I kid you not; how hard is it to keep the clock going?). Can't speak to the Samsung or other Android based tablets since I've never had a chance to play with one.
My wife's Playbook -- well, the browser crashes all of the time, there's not much software available for it, and usually when she turns it on she has to wrestle with it to get it to connect to our wi-fi, or occasionally hard-boot it as the whole thing locks up. She's getting to the point where she might stop using it. Which is sad, because when I bought it for her at Christmas, it was a really sweet deal and thought she'd get some use out of it.
What Apple did was to actually produce a polished product that worked when they released it. Microsoft is playing "me too" as usual and trying to build something. HP released a turd and then discontinued it. RIM hasn't yet caught up yet. The Android marketplace comprises so many different devices that I'm not even sure you can compare them to themselves.
So, I'm just not convinced that another of the candidates could have released "exactly the same product"... because they don't seem to be doing it yet. I will say this for Apple, by the time they release it, it actually has been tested and works. A lot of products get released which shouldn't be considered anything more than a beta release.
To a certain extent, the form factor is more novel than the features.
Personally, I find it more comfortable to browse google maps when I can scroll and zoom with my fingers and be sitting in a comfy chair. Same goes for reading web pages. Hell, I once used mine to review a 1000 page PDF document for a proposal our company was working on -- and I did it in a lawnchair in the backyard for some of the time.
Being able to watch a movie on a plane is far easier with a tablet than a laptop -- I know this because my boss and I were on the same flight a few months ago, and when the guy in front of him reclined, there wasn't enough room to keep his laptop fully open. On the next trip, he'd gotten himself an iPad and is loving it.
Unless you think the smart phone is also a novelty because you can do the same and more with a PC, I fail to see why the tablet is any different. It's a scaled up version of the same thing. I don't want a smart phone because I already have a tablet, and I'm not that interested in one. I know people who already had smart phones who don't want a tablet for pretty much the same reason.
I can lie down on my sofa to play games, read an ebook in bed, surf the web from my lazy boy or my lawn chair. I can also get quick wireless in most airports and when I visit family. So, for just a quick email to the wife while I'm traveling or even checking my company email, it's very convenient.
I didn't buy it to do 'work' on; I've got a desktop and a laptop for that -- it's mostly an entertainment device, and most people buying them know that. If you don't expect it to do the same things as your PC, you don't really feel it's missing something. I find I use mine entirely differently than I would my desktop.
I predict you'll be proven wrong about the long-term viability of the form factor, because most of the people I know have some form of tablet (HP, Apple, Android... you name it), and all of them get a lot of usage out of them.
I travelled for business about 9-10 times over the last 14 months -- every time I had both my iPad and my laptop, and in all cases I only ever used the iPad. Mostly because the iPad is much more portable, has way better battery life than my laptop, and lets me get to the things I need much more quickly (since it takes about 5 seconds to turn it on and connect to wi-fi).
Slashdot is a horrible representative sample for this kind of thing... because most of us are looking to do much more exotic things than most consumers. But most people, most of the time, are much more passively consuming stuff and just noodling about on the web. For that, a tablet is a really good choice.
Mostly useable - zooming out is not easy (is there any way of just zooming out?
Well, the scroll wheel on my mouse seems to work. But, it just scales everything so some of the informational elements just zoom out of view. But you can drag those around.
Sensible to you maybe. The American way reads the way the date is normally spoken. We usually say "March 14th 2012"
But, for any data stored in a computer, it's generally a totally useless format, since you can't sort on it. unless you actually have it broken into fields.
When I write in my lab book, I write the way you said it. But when I need a computer to store data, yyyy-mm-dd makes the most sense.
We actually had this issue come up at a company I worked at. It's a multi-national, but the Americans insisted we switch all the computer program to use their date format. Eventually it took the CIO saying "too bad, this is corporate data standard" to resolve the issue. Mostly because it absolutely broke everything if you had to do data interchange (or share the system).
It may be closer to how we say dates, and match up with how many of us write dates, but once it's being stored in a computer, it's kind of a dumb format.
Couldn't you fix this by adding an additional layer of password creation on your end?
The more random your password, the less vulnerable it is to a dictionary attack, so yes.
In this case, they're identifying that many people use multi-word pass phrases which might be more susceptible to a dictionary attack because they end up being fairly common.
So, a truly random set of characters is likely to be impossible to remember, but really secure. But "Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone" might be fairly weak if they're using IMDB as a source and actually getting hits.
From the sounds of it, people tend to pull those from more common pools than you'd expect, thereby making them not as secure as you'd hope.
There is something that always bothered me, how in the hell does the attacker knows if I am using words for my password or not?
They don't, but if they have the resources for a brute-force search, it's moot since in theory they'll just keep trying until they find it.
Second consider the following password where at one point was on my laptop: "A happy worker is mindless worker, so shut up and do your job!" I fail to see how this password is not safe just because I used actual words, wouldn't it take million of years(even with dictionary attack) to gess it ?
Well, possibly not. Think about a document with a password.
If someone really wants to get into it, and is willing to invest the time and hardware, having a computer try millions and millions of permutations isn't as expensive as you might think, and it gets cheaper every year.
Many forms of crypto have fallen over the years as the speed of computers has allowed what used to be an impossible task to be something which can be done in relatively short time. Even a couple of days or weeks of compute time would represent an absolutely vast amount of attempts.
It's a damned find pass-phrase, but a computer is really good at doing an endless set of boring things. So, eventually even if it's a massive brute force attack, it could still arrive at the one that worked.
However, this is the most telling part:
The researchers found that film and book titles were effective in identifying pass-phrases in use - information readily available in list-form online suitable for dictionary-style attacks. The researchers used Wikipedia and IMDB lists, as well as slang phrases from Urban Dictionary. Researchers found users tended to favor simple two-word phrases common in natural language, though there is evidence that some users seek out seemingly-random pairings. The researchers also claim that there are "rapidly diminishing returns" for longer pass-phrases containing three or four words.
So, if movie names and slang is what many people are using as their pass-phrases, a dictionary attack is a little easier.
But, something like "cotillion squirrel hammer bollocks gouda inkwell" might be random enough that the sources people might use to try a dictionary attack won't be of any help. Whereas "The Dark Knight" or "Star Wars" might fall pretty quickly.
Speaking to BBC Newsbeat, Mr O'Dwyer said: "I've done nothing wrong under UK law, and, it's pretty ridiculous isn't it?
He didn't break any UK laws. But he can get extradited. That makes no sense. Never mind the fact that he never actually provided any copyrighted information, just links to it.
This is so horribly flawed, it isn't funny. Welcome to a world in which extraterritorial laws can be applied whenever someone wishes -- or, more accurately, when the government in question can exert enough pressure on your own. Which basically is the US.
Can't wait for Americans to be extradited to Iran or somewhere else for violating their laws... because it would be hypocritical to deny the request now.
After all, if you can ask for the extradition of someone who didn't break any laws in their country, you can't deny to extradite your own people who broke the laws of another country. But, we won't see that.
Someone jumped the shark here, not sure if it was the UK or the US to be honest. I think both have set a horrible precedent.
But it should be noted that all almost all models of a 'free market' include all people working under the same rules.
Which is why a 'free market' is an abstract notion that has never existed, and cannot exist.
Yet people still cling to it like it's a real, tangible thing, and continue to believe that "if only we had this" it would solve everything efficiently.
To me, the "free market" is a fantasy that people cling to because their ideology won't allow for anything else -- it's a friggin' unicorn. And since it's never truly existed, all of those things people claim it does are based on their belief system.
It would be nice to have a functioning democracy. I just wish we could have a referendum on protectionism here in the U.S.
What makes you think it would help? The US would vote overwhelmingly in favor of protectionism -- it's a hugely protectionist country despite claiming to want free trade.
Your watch is probably doing a rather lame decoding of the signal.
Yeah, I figured that part out.:-P
It's a relatively inexpensive Casio, so it's not like I expected a great amount of technology.
Was just a little bummed that it has rarely (if ever) been able to set from the atomic signal -- that was supposed to be the cool part, and what I could use as a baseline to keep my other watches set correctly.
So, I can do this with Apple TV. At one point, I did this with my XBox.
Things like Slingbox have allowed you to stream your media to your TV for years.
Why is this industry incapable of recognizing that users would prefer to have a juke-box with their movies? Especially people with kids I should think.
In this case, it sounds like the product tried very hard to not be helping illegal copying.
Your suggestion that a religionist is incapable of doing that sort of work is falsifiable. Are you going to be scientific about it?
You'll note that other than pointing out that if someone was trying to push their religion on me at work, I said nothing at all on the topic... I certainly didn't use the word religionist.
I don't need to be scientifically rigorous about the falsifiable statement you attribute to me since I didn't make it -- I know someone with two Master's degrees and a PhD who is a devout Catholic. He has no conflict whatsoever between being an astrophysicist and being religious -- because the two things fill different roles in his life. The Catholic church said long ago that it accepts evolution as scientific fact. Not everyone has difficulties reconciling their religion and science. But, some people believe since their religion contradicts science, the fault must lie in science. I call those people morons.
My entire post was about whether or not a computer specialist would be required to use the scientific method, which you asserted they wouldn't. I merely pointed out that you can't do anything requiring logical thought and use of hypotheses without bumping into the scientific method.
In what way does a computer specialist's job rely on the scientific method?
I'd say that any diagnostic and troubleshooting is going to use the scientific method.
Based on the data, you formulate a hypothesis as to the underlying cause, and then attempt to remediate it. Then you determine if your hypothesis was correct, and you're either done, or you need to keep looking for another plausible hypothesis.
I'm sorry, but anybody who has to work with reality and arrive at logical conclusions based on reality is going to use the scientific method in some way or another. Otherwise you'd be doing things at random.
If your sysadmin is pulling out the ouija board or calling the psychic hotline to find out what's wrong with the server, get a new sysadmin.
And, slightly more on topic, if a co-worker started handing me DVDs on intelligent design, I'd be forced to tell him to keep his crap to himself -- same as if you handed me pamphlets for your church; I'm not interested, please go away or I shall have to talk to HR.
OCD is always a liability, by definition. If it's not a liability, it doesn't qualify as a disorder, and you don't have OCD
I have known several people with varying degrees of OCD. Some with minor quirks that weren't debilitating... some much more severe and in need of being under care.
I guess clinically you could describe it more like Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder -- to Freud it included "anal retentive character", though, I mostly think of Freud as a coke-head with dodgy ideas.
As with all aspects of human behavior, there's a continuum of it from mild to severe.
I'd say counting and recording your steps every day is edging at least into the mild end of that. Except he's also a functioning, brilliant mathematician -- which makes him quirky and eccentric, but not necessarily someone with a clinical disorder. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have some of the same traits.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked in the airline industry before -- it's not fear mongering, it's more that they can't definitely say it won't experience problems. So therefore, they just go with the ban.
Airlines are extremely risk averse, and in the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they're going to come down on the side of caution. The engineers in that industry will always go where the least risk is.
It's not some conspiracy to deprive you of Angry Birds. They really don't know everything which could go wrong, and since it's an FAA policy, they stick with it. If the FAA ever says "OK, go ahead, we've tested it and it's safe", they'll change.
If you think the airlines would change without approval from the FAA, you're wrong.
The problem is the sheer scale of the number of on-board electronics and available consumer devices. They simply don't know.
Wow. That is truly sad. Well, I guess I can stop thinking about driving through New England anytime soon ... it's beginning to sound like the East Germany of yore.
Ummmm ... would that be sites requiring a subscription? ;-)
Well, 2000 hours gives you 40 hours/week for 50 weeks.
So, 732 hours of TV is a part-time job. :-P
So, they're just doing a "papers please and submit to random inspection" kind of checkpoint?
Gee, so much for the 4th amendment. What next, "border" checks in Kansas or something?
Well, therein lies the rub.
We all saw the HP tablet -- it was a dog that eventually HP themselves was selling for about $99 to their employees to clear it out.
My brother's tiny little off-name Android tablet is cool enough, but has a fairly low-res display and seemed to have some warts (the clock stops when it's turned off, I kid you not; how hard is it to keep the clock going?). Can't speak to the Samsung or other Android based tablets since I've never had a chance to play with one.
My wife's Playbook -- well, the browser crashes all of the time, there's not much software available for it, and usually when she turns it on she has to wrestle with it to get it to connect to our wi-fi, or occasionally hard-boot it as the whole thing locks up. She's getting to the point where she might stop using it. Which is sad, because when I bought it for her at Christmas, it was a really sweet deal and thought she'd get some use out of it.
What Apple did was to actually produce a polished product that worked when they released it. Microsoft is playing "me too" as usual and trying to build something. HP released a turd and then discontinued it. RIM hasn't yet caught up yet. The Android marketplace comprises so many different devices that I'm not even sure you can compare them to themselves.
So, I'm just not convinced that another of the candidates could have released "exactly the same product" ... because they don't seem to be doing it yet. I will say this for Apple, by the time they release it, it actually has been tested and works. A lot of products get released which shouldn't be considered anything more than a beta release.
To a certain extent, the form factor is more novel than the features.
Personally, I find it more comfortable to browse google maps when I can scroll and zoom with my fingers and be sitting in a comfy chair. Same goes for reading web pages. Hell, I once used mine to review a 1000 page PDF document for a proposal our company was working on -- and I did it in a lawnchair in the backyard for some of the time.
Being able to watch a movie on a plane is far easier with a tablet than a laptop -- I know this because my boss and I were on the same flight a few months ago, and when the guy in front of him reclined, there wasn't enough room to keep his laptop fully open. On the next trip, he'd gotten himself an iPad and is loving it.
Unless you think the smart phone is also a novelty because you can do the same and more with a PC, I fail to see why the tablet is any different. It's a scaled up version of the same thing. I don't want a smart phone because I already have a tablet, and I'm not that interested in one. I know people who already had smart phones who don't want a tablet for pretty much the same reason.
I can lie down on my sofa to play games, read an ebook in bed, surf the web from my lazy boy or my lawn chair. I can also get quick wireless in most airports and when I visit family. So, for just a quick email to the wife while I'm traveling or even checking my company email, it's very convenient.
I didn't buy it to do 'work' on; I've got a desktop and a laptop for that -- it's mostly an entertainment device, and most people buying them know that. If you don't expect it to do the same things as your PC, you don't really feel it's missing something. I find I use mine entirely differently than I would my desktop.
I predict you'll be proven wrong about the long-term viability of the form factor, because most of the people I know have some form of tablet (HP, Apple, Android ... you name it), and all of them get a lot of usage out of them.
I travelled for business about 9-10 times over the last 14 months -- every time I had both my iPad and my laptop, and in all cases I only ever used the iPad. Mostly because the iPad is much more portable, has way better battery life than my laptop, and lets me get to the things I need much more quickly (since it takes about 5 seconds to turn it on and connect to wi-fi).
Slashdot is a horrible representative sample for this kind of thing ... because most of us are looking to do much more exotic things than most consumers. But most people, most of the time, are much more passively consuming stuff and just noodling about on the web. For that, a tablet is a really good choice.
Well, the scroll wheel on my mouse seems to work. But, it just scales everything so some of the informational elements just zoom out of view. But you can drag those around.
But, for any data stored in a computer, it's generally a totally useless format, since you can't sort on it. unless you actually have it broken into fields.
When I write in my lab book, I write the way you said it. But when I need a computer to store data, yyyy-mm-dd makes the most sense.
We actually had this issue come up at a company I worked at. It's a multi-national, but the Americans insisted we switch all the computer program to use their date format. Eventually it took the CIO saying "too bad, this is corporate data standard" to resolve the issue. Mostly because it absolutely broke everything if you had to do data interchange (or share the system).
It may be closer to how we say dates, and match up with how many of us write dates, but once it's being stored in a computer, it's kind of a dumb format.
The more random your password, the less vulnerable it is to a dictionary attack, so yes.
In this case, they're identifying that many people use multi-word pass phrases which might be more susceptible to a dictionary attack because they end up being fairly common.
So, a truly random set of characters is likely to be impossible to remember, but really secure. But "Harry Potter and the philosopher's stone" might be fairly weak if they're using IMDB as a source and actually getting hits.
From the sounds of it, people tend to pull those from more common pools than you'd expect, thereby making them not as secure as you'd hope.
They don't, but if they have the resources for a brute-force search, it's moot since in theory they'll just keep trying until they find it.
Well, possibly not. Think about a document with a password.
If someone really wants to get into it, and is willing to invest the time and hardware, having a computer try millions and millions of permutations isn't as expensive as you might think, and it gets cheaper every year.
Many forms of crypto have fallen over the years as the speed of computers has allowed what used to be an impossible task to be something which can be done in relatively short time. Even a couple of days or weeks of compute time would represent an absolutely vast amount of attempts.
It's a damned find pass-phrase, but a computer is really good at doing an endless set of boring things. So, eventually even if it's a massive brute force attack, it could still arrive at the one that worked.
However, this is the most telling part:
So, if movie names and slang is what many people are using as their pass-phrases, a dictionary attack is a little easier.
But, something like "cotillion squirrel hammer bollocks gouda inkwell" might be random enough that the sources people might use to try a dictionary attack won't be of any help. Whereas "The Dark Knight" or "Star Wars" might fall pretty quickly.
He didn't break any UK laws. But he can get extradited. That makes no sense. Never mind the fact that he never actually provided any copyrighted information, just links to it.
This is so horribly flawed, it isn't funny. Welcome to a world in which extraterritorial laws can be applied whenever someone wishes -- or, more accurately, when the government in question can exert enough pressure on your own. Which basically is the US.
Can't wait for Americans to be extradited to Iran or somewhere else for violating their laws ... because it would be hypocritical to deny the request now.
After all, if you can ask for the extradition of someone who didn't break any laws in their country, you can't deny to extradite your own people who broke the laws of another country. But, we won't see that.
Someone jumped the shark here, not sure if it was the UK or the US to be honest. I think both have set a horrible precedent.
Which is why a 'free market' is an abstract notion that has never existed, and cannot exist.
Yet people still cling to it like it's a real, tangible thing, and continue to believe that "if only we had this" it would solve everything efficiently.
To me, the "free market" is a fantasy that people cling to because their ideology won't allow for anything else -- it's a friggin' unicorn. And since it's never truly existed, all of those things people claim it does are based on their belief system.
Yeah, tried standing in the back yard facing mostly west, but not much luck. But, that was during the day.
Sadly, no window faces the right direction that is helpful here.
Trying to sync after midnight CST (isn't Denver MST?) might help. It's not the end of the world ... it hasn't worked yet. :-P
What makes you think it would help? The US would vote overwhelmingly in favor of protectionism -- it's a hugely protectionist country despite claiming to want free trade.
You know, I increasingly think that this be read aloud any time a government tries to pass a law about technology.
If you don't know how it works, don't touch it. :-P
Yeah, I figured that part out. :-P
It's a relatively inexpensive Casio, so it's not like I expected a great amount of technology.
Was just a little bummed that it has rarely (if ever) been able to set from the atomic signal -- that was supposed to be the cool part, and what I could use as a baseline to keep my other watches set correctly.
I can't even get my atomic watch to set properly from the time signal that exists now.
I must be too far from Denver for the signal to get to my watch. Which sucks, since it defeats the whole purpose of having that.
No. I didn't realize the tool in question was allowing you to rip for later playback.
So, yeah, a fair bit of difference in those two.
So, I can do this with Apple TV. At one point, I did this with my XBox.
Things like Slingbox have allowed you to stream your media to your TV for years.
Why is this industry incapable of recognizing that users would prefer to have a juke-box with their movies? Especially people with kids I should think.
In this case, it sounds like the product tried very hard to not be helping illegal copying.
Surely she's capable of verifying that with a google search.
Convincing her it's anything other than a geek thing, well, that might be tougher. :-P
You'll note that other than pointing out that if someone was trying to push their religion on me at work, I said nothing at all on the topic ... I certainly didn't use the word religionist.
I don't need to be scientifically rigorous about the falsifiable statement you attribute to me since I didn't make it -- I know someone with two Master's degrees and a PhD who is a devout Catholic. He has no conflict whatsoever between being an astrophysicist and being religious -- because the two things fill different roles in his life. The Catholic church said long ago that it accepts evolution as scientific fact. Not everyone has difficulties reconciling their religion and science. But, some people believe since their religion contradicts science, the fault must lie in science. I call those people morons.
My entire post was about whether or not a computer specialist would be required to use the scientific method, which you asserted they wouldn't. I merely pointed out that you can't do anything requiring logical thought and use of hypotheses without bumping into the scientific method.
Wow, is your secretary some kind of frustrated geek or something?
I didn't even know there were Pi carols.
I'd say that any diagnostic and troubleshooting is going to use the scientific method.
Based on the data, you formulate a hypothesis as to the underlying cause, and then attempt to remediate it. Then you determine if your hypothesis was correct, and you're either done, or you need to keep looking for another plausible hypothesis.
I'm sorry, but anybody who has to work with reality and arrive at logical conclusions based on reality is going to use the scientific method in some way or another. Otherwise you'd be doing things at random.
If your sysadmin is pulling out the ouija board or calling the psychic hotline to find out what's wrong with the server, get a new sysadmin.
And, slightly more on topic, if a co-worker started handing me DVDs on intelligent design, I'd be forced to tell him to keep his crap to himself -- same as if you handed me pamphlets for your church; I'm not interested, please go away or I shall have to talk to HR.
I have known several people with varying degrees of OCD. Some with minor quirks that weren't debilitating ... some much more severe and in need of being under care.
I guess clinically you could describe it more like Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder -- to Freud it included "anal retentive character", though, I mostly think of Freud as a coke-head with dodgy ideas.
As with all aspects of human behavior, there's a continuum of it from mild to severe.
I'd say counting and recording your steps every day is edging at least into the mild end of that. Except he's also a functioning, brilliant mathematician -- which makes him quirky and eccentric, but not necessarily someone with a clinical disorder. But that doesn't mean he doesn't have some of the same traits.