A Quartz article says the DHS accidentally released more than 800 pages "demonstrating how easy it was to hack elements in power and water systems."
The article says the DoD bought devices that would protect power plants from attack:
“DOD bought several of the iGR-933, they bought them to give them away to utilities with critical substations,” Weiss said. “Even though DOD was trying to give them away, they couldn’t give them to any of the utilities because any facility they put them in would become a ‘critical facility’ and the facility would be open to NERC-CIP audits.”
Assuming this article is accurate (I don't know how power stations work), I hope the new Congress will care enough about security to force utilities to secure themselves. I'm not holding my breath, though.
I agree that helping countries develop helps slow the birthrate. My point is that slowing the birthrate helps countries develop, also. Culture (ex: "Ten or 15 more sons will be a healthy sign.") and lack of birth control also contribute to big families.
And yes, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has helped women get birth control. Family planning is an important topic for Melinda Gates. I'm not saying people aren't emphasizing the need at all for birth control these days. But there was much more emphasis on it in the 1960s and 1970s. These days, how many warnings do you hear in the news, about population increase?
Regarding fear of seeming to be a racist, do a Google on "population control racism" (without the quotes). You'll see lots of articles, in which people claim that population control equals racism. Ex: the MotherJones has an article titled "Why Is Population Control Such a Radioactive Topic?". This article says, "Rinku Sen is a leading racial justice advocate, the publisher of ColorLines magazine, and president of the Applied Research Center: The reason people get so upset about population control is because historically reproduction has been controlled without the consent of the controlled person or community—usually with a deep racial or class dimension."
Certainly not everyone believes population control == racism. The government of China, with its one-child policy, is certainly not racist against Asians. But unfortunately, many people do think control == racism.
The long term fix is control of human population growth.
Absolutely, we need to decrease population growth - in the entire world, including California.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, environmentalists were very much concerned about population growth. Speakers and books warned about the "population explosion".
But today, you don't hear many warnings about overpopulation. I don't know why. The only reason I can think of is that most population growth (through births and immigration) is from non-Caucasians. Environmentalists don't want to be racists or seem to be racists, so they don't warn about population growth like they used to.
And that's bad. We need those warnings. An increase in population increases demand for food, water and energy. And more housing, businesses and streets put pressure on farmers to sell their land to developers (shrinking our food supply). The southern part of the San Francisco Bay area used to have lots of farms. Now those farms are almost all gone.
You don't have to use software that was written for organizing photos. First figure out the attributes that you care about (ex: year, location, occasion). Then:
Put the file names and attribute information into a spreadsheet. One row per photo. First column for the file name, then one column per attribute (year, etc.). Then you can search, sort and filter the spreadsheet, to find certain kinds of photos. If there are too many photos for one spreadsheet, split them up into several spreadsheets. (Ex: one spreadsheet each, for photos of your parents' childhood, from when you lived in New York, etc.)
-or-
Create folders named "parents childhood", "lived in New York", "Susan's high school graduation.", etc. Then for each photo about when you lived in New York, put a Unix link or a Windows shortcut file of that photo in the "lived in New York" folder. For each photo of Susan's high school graduation, put a link or shortcut into the "Susan's high school graduation" folder. (Of course, you might put links or shortcuts of the same photo into multiple folders.)
Suppose I wanted to convince you to eat vegetarian.
1) I might politely point out the advantages to a vegetarian diet, being careful not to bother you. Result: You might eat a little less meat a few times a year. And you would not thing that vegetarians were such bad people.
2) Or in the middle of the night, I could walk on your lawn, damaging it, and put pro-vegetarian signs on your lawn. Result: Just to resist me, you'd order a 1/2-pound burger. There's no way you would decrease the amount of meat that you ate, if I annoyed you like this. Plus, you'd think that vegetarians were a bunch of !@#$'s.
Greenpeace and some of its supporters are saying that Greenpeace is trying to draw attention to global warming. But trespassing and damaging activities like this don't draw attention to global warming. Instead, they draw very negative attention to Greenpeace. I haven't seen any polls, but I would guess that fewer people today like or respect Greenpeace than a few days ago.
School children should be required to take simple classes in logic. At least teach them common fallacies like affirming the consequent and the post hoc fallacy ("someone got a flu shot and later developed X disease, so the flu shot causes X disease.")
This kind of training would help them see through irrational anti-vaccination arguments. And if logic is taught and emphasized in school, hopefully the students will learn to prefer logic and facts over touchy-feely "I feel/believe X to be true".
As we restructure The New Republic, we will be making significant investments in creating a more effective and efficient newsroom as well as improved products across all platforms. This will require a recalibration of our resources in order to deliver the best product possible. In order to do so, we’ve made the decision to reduce the frequency of our print publication from 20 to 10 issues a year and will be making improvements to the magazine itself.
Given the frequency reduction, we will also be making some changes to staff structure.
We do care about you. We're rooting for you, and we want you to get well.
Everyone is different from everyone else. You're different from everyone else. You have your own unique way of solving a problem or telling a story. Because you're unique, you're irreplaceable. The world would be poorer without your personal ideas and insights. So for our sake, as well as for your sake, I'll say that I really, really hope you make a total recovery. My best wishes to you.
Can you contribute code that lets the user choose the colors of the UI? Let the "improved" colors be the default, but let the user override them in Preferences. That wouldn't fix the functionality, but at least you could make the appearance be the way you want.
I'm curious if this'll be an all-or-nothing thing, or if there are degrees of gradation. Pain itself serves good in that it prevents one from doing things that cause it, so we don't injure ourselves.
The article at http://brain.oxfordjournals.or... has a short section titled "MRS5698 does not alter normal nociception". That section says, "MRS5698 tested at the highest effective dose had no effect in tests that measure the acute thermal nociceptive component of physiological pain: tail flick and hot-plate (Fig. 2H and I)."
Nociception (also nocioception or nociperception) is the encoding and processing of harmful stimuli in the nervous system,[1] and, therefore, the ability of a body to sense potential harm.
Any doctors here - does that mean pain from danger still is felt, just not chronic pain from damaged nerves?
Wow, that article makes it sound like the French people don't have any fun - they just "... love sharing news and politics on social networks – in short, pretty serious stuff” and that they are "irredeemable snobs". Fortunately that's not true, as evidenced by this video.
The Wikipedia article on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill says, "The US Government estimated the total discharge at 4.9 million barrels...." This article says, "The largest tankers trading today are comparable in size and can carry up to 2 million barrels of oil." So almost 5 million barrels were spilled in 2010, and the largest oil tanker can carry 2 million barrels.
The next time oil comes up uncontrolled from the sea floor, maybe this will work: Take an empty super-tanker, and cut a 100-foot hole in the top of it. Turn it upside-down, and lower it to the ocean floor. Lower it on top of the oil gusher, so that oil from the gusher will go into the tanker, displacing any air or water in the tanker. If the tanker fills with oil, pipe the surplus oil to another sunken tanker.
According to these images, the tops of tankers aren't completely flat. So the hole in the tanker won't be directly on the ocean floor. Since there will be a gap between the tanker and the ocean floor, there will be room under the tanker to move equipment to the gusher, to close it. While the oil company is closing the gusher, the tanker will collect the oil so that the oil doesn't pollute, and so that it isn't lost.
(If gold instead of oil were washed away, people would rightly complain that our national treasure was being wasted. National treasure is also wasted if oil is dispersed and lost.)
If BP likes another idea better, fine. Whatever idea they decide on, they should test and improve it now, so that they're ready for the next oil spill.
I hope robot companies are doing R&D on how their robots, instead of Ebola care-givers, could do dangerous work.
Gizmodo has an article on robots fighting Ebola. The article lists ways that robots could be used, including removing biowaste, and delivering supplies to people who are healthy but cut off.
Countries do some things well, and other things badly. Apparently Nigeria has done a good job at stopping Ebola. We should respect that, and learn lessons from them on how to stop it here in the US.
Back around the year 2000, ISPs used to offer free web hosting to their customers. Some ISPs had templates that you could fill in with text and uploaded images, to make it simple to create a web page.
If ISPs still offered that service, and if customers who don't know how to write a web page used the service, then private web sites would be more dispersed, and therefore less tempting to crack. (Also, the customers wouldn't have to give out personal information, besides the info that they already needed to give out for their Internet connection.)
This service should let the customers password-protect their web pages.
This could be a more private and secure service for customers who just want a simple "Hello, this is me" web site.
I generally like The Onion, but that article bothers me. I'm a white person who has lived my whole life in the US. I've given money to international aid organizations. My last donation (about a month ago) was $1,000 to Doctors Without Borders, which has several doctors in Africa, fighting Ebola.
According to the article "How Nigeria has succeeded in containing Ebola", there's hope that Ebola can be contained. The article tells how leaders including Babatunde Fashola, governor of Lagos state, have put procedures in place to stop the spread of Ebola. Nigeria is a large, populous country. But it has had only 21 cases of Ebola, and nine deaths.
And this is in a country with lots of internal problems. I really hope Boko Haram doesn't mess up their efforts.
I walk for exercise. When I get tired or bored, my speed slows down.
I would like an app that plays music at the speed that I want. I don't know the term, but it's possible to speed up music without changing the key, by taking tiny slices out of the music. For example, to speed up music by 10%, remove 1/100 of a second of the music every tenth of a second. And to slow music down 10%, repeat 1/100 of a second of the music each tenth of a second.
I'd like to adjust the music's tempo to a good walking speed. Then I could walk to the music, one step per beat, and not slow down.
How about this as a way to cut the spread of germs? Pick a surface that lots of people touch, like the handle of a bathroom door. Wash the door handle. Take a washcloth and pump Purell or Germ-X into it. Attach the washcloth to the door handle with clean rubber bands. Every hour, pump more Purell into the washcloth; and every day, replace the washcloth.
Now if I open the door with dirty hands, most germs that I transfer to the washcloth are killed by the Purell. And the Purell in the washcloth will kill lots germs on my hands, so that I will be less likely to spread germs elsewhere.
This isn't a substitute for washing hands. But since kids don't wash hands like they should, it should help.
A doctor would have to approve this. Would someone have an allergic reaction to Purell or Germ-X? Is it safe to touch these gels if you have a cut on your hand?
And some non-medical concerns: If I'm wearing a ring, I don't want the ring to catch on the washcloth as I pull my hand away from the doorknob. (I might lose my finger!) Also there would have to be a carpet under the doorknob. We don't want people to slip on any Purell that drips from the washcloth.
On the other hand, I explicitly recall a statement along the lines of "we aren't going to worry about security until after we get it all up and working first" from one the people running the program. I sure wish I had bookmarked it because it is the kind of thing that is too stupid to believe.
Maybe you're thinking about this: "Among the issues that concerned the government's own technical experts was that security testing could not be completed because the system was undergoing so many last-minute changes."
An article by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) briefly mentions climate change, but the article is mostly about how much ash that would fall on the continental US. The article also says, "... multiple inches of ash can damage buildings, block sewer and water lines, and disrupt livestock and crop production...".
Those are my main concerns - Ash on the ground disrupting the production of food and clean water and getting them to people, and ash in the atmosphere causing climate change.
Slashdot Mirror
A Quartz article says the DHS accidentally released more than 800 pages "demonstrating how easy it was to hack elements in power and water systems."
The article says the DoD bought devices that would protect power plants from attack:
“DOD bought several of the iGR-933, they bought them to give them away to utilities with critical substations,” Weiss said. “Even though DOD was trying to give them away, they couldn’t give them to any of the utilities because any facility they put them in would become a ‘critical facility’ and the facility would be open to NERC-CIP audits.”
Assuming this article is accurate (I don't know how power stations work), I hope the new Congress will care enough about security to force utilities to secure themselves. I'm not holding my breath, though.
I agree that helping countries develop helps slow the birthrate. My point is that slowing the birthrate helps countries develop, also. Culture (ex: "Ten or 15 more sons will be a healthy sign.") and lack of birth control also contribute to big families.
And yes, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has helped women get birth control. Family planning is an important topic for Melinda Gates. I'm not saying people aren't emphasizing the need at all for birth control these days. But there was much more emphasis on it in the 1960s and 1970s. These days, how many warnings do you hear in the news, about population increase?
Regarding fear of seeming to be a racist, do a Google on "population control racism" (without the quotes). You'll see lots of articles, in which people claim that population control equals racism. Ex: the MotherJones has an article titled "Why Is Population Control Such a Radioactive Topic?". This article says, "Rinku Sen is a leading racial justice advocate, the publisher of ColorLines magazine, and president of the Applied Research Center: The reason people get so upset about population control is because historically reproduction has been controlled without the consent of the controlled person or community—usually with a deep racial or class dimension."
Certainly not everyone believes population control == racism. The government of China, with its one-child policy, is certainly not racist against Asians. But unfortunately, many people do think control == racism.
The long term fix is control of human population growth.
Absolutely, we need to decrease population growth - in the entire world, including California.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, environmentalists were very much concerned about population growth. Speakers and books warned about the "population explosion".
But today, you don't hear many warnings about overpopulation. I don't know why. The only reason I can think of is that most population growth (through births and immigration) is from non-Caucasians. Environmentalists don't want to be racists or seem to be racists, so they don't warn about population growth like they used to.
And that's bad. We need those warnings. An increase in population increases demand for food, water and energy. And more housing, businesses and streets put pressure on farmers to sell their land to developers (shrinking our food supply). The southern part of the San Francisco Bay area used to have lots of farms. Now those farms are almost all gone.
You don't have to use software that was written for organizing photos. First figure out the attributes that you care about (ex: year, location, occasion). Then:
Put the file names and attribute information into a spreadsheet. One row per photo. First column for the file name, then one column per attribute (year, etc.). Then you can search, sort and filter the spreadsheet, to find certain kinds of photos. If there are too many photos for one spreadsheet, split them up into several spreadsheets. (Ex: one spreadsheet each, for photos of your parents' childhood, from when you lived in New York, etc.)
-or-
Create folders named "parents childhood", "lived in New York", "Susan's high school graduation.", etc. Then for each photo about when you lived in New York, put a Unix link or a Windows shortcut file of that photo in the "lived in New York" folder. For each photo of Susan's high school graduation, put a link or shortcut into the "Susan's high school graduation" folder. (Of course, you might put links or shortcuts of the same photo into multiple folders.)
Suppose I wanted to convince you to eat vegetarian.
1) I might politely point out the advantages to a vegetarian diet, being careful not to bother you. Result: You might eat a little less meat a few times a year. And you would not thing that vegetarians were such bad people.
2) Or in the middle of the night, I could walk on your lawn, damaging it, and put pro-vegetarian signs on your lawn. Result: Just to resist me, you'd order a 1/2-pound burger. There's no way you would decrease the amount of meat that you ate, if I annoyed you like this. Plus, you'd think that vegetarians were a bunch of !@#$'s.
Greenpeace and some of its supporters are saying that Greenpeace is trying to draw attention to global warming. But trespassing and damaging activities like this don't draw attention to global warming. Instead, they draw very negative attention to Greenpeace. I haven't seen any polls, but I would guess that fewer people today like or respect Greenpeace than a few days ago.
School children should be required to take simple classes in logic. At least teach them common fallacies like affirming the consequent and the post hoc fallacy ("someone got a flu shot and later developed X disease, so the flu shot causes X disease.")
This kind of training would help them see through irrational anti-vaccination arguments. And if logic is taught and emphasized in school, hopefully the students will learn to prefer logic and facts over touchy-feely "I feel/believe X to be true".
Re. buzzwords, I'm guessing the editor is referring to a quote from the new CEO, Guy Vidra:
Mr. Vidra said in a memo to the staff on Thursday that he wanted to reimagine the publication “as a vertically integrated digital media company.”
Vidra also wrote,
As we restructure The New Republic, we will be making significant investments in creating a more effective and efficient newsroom as well as improved products across all platforms. This will require a recalibration of our resources in order to deliver the best product possible. In order to do so, we’ve made the decision to reduce the frequency of our print publication from 20 to 10 issues a year and will be making improvements to the magazine itself.
Given the frequency reduction, we will also be making some changes to staff structure.
That probably didn't go over too well, either.
And no one will care.
We do care about you. We're rooting for you, and we want you to get well.
Everyone is different from everyone else. You're different from everyone else. You have your own unique way of solving a problem or telling a story. Because you're unique, you're irreplaceable. The world would be poorer without your personal ideas and insights. So for our sake, as well as for your sake, I'll say that I really, really hope you make a total recovery. My best wishes to you.
Can you contribute code that lets the user choose the colors of the UI? Let the "improved" colors be the default, but let the user override them in Preferences. That wouldn't fix the functionality, but at least you could make the appearance be the way you want.
I'm curious if this'll be an all-or-nothing thing, or if there are degrees of gradation. Pain itself serves good in that it prevents one from doing things that cause it, so we don't injure ourselves.
The article at http://brain.oxfordjournals.or... has a short section titled "MRS5698 does not alter normal nociception". That section says, "MRS5698 tested at the highest effective dose had no effect in tests that measure the acute thermal nociceptive component of physiological pain: tail flick and hot-plate (Fig. 2H and I)."
Wikipedia says,
Nociception (also nocioception or nociperception) is the encoding and processing of harmful stimuli in the nervous system,[1] and, therefore, the ability of a body to sense potential harm.
Any doctors here - does that mean pain from danger still is felt, just not chronic pain from damaged nerves?
Probably the funniest cat video I've seen
Thanks! I saw that video years ago, then lost track of where it was. I've got it bookmarked now.
Poom! Flea Attack!
Wow, that article makes it sound like the French people don't have any fun - they just "... love sharing news and politics on social networks – in short, pretty serious stuff” and that they are "irredeemable snobs". Fortunately that's not true, as evidenced by this video.
The Wikipedia article on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill says, "The US Government estimated the total discharge at 4.9 million barrels ...." This article says, "The largest tankers trading today are comparable in size and can carry up to 2 million barrels of oil." So almost 5 million barrels were spilled in 2010, and the largest oil tanker can carry 2 million barrels.
The next time oil comes up uncontrolled from the sea floor, maybe this will work: Take an empty super-tanker, and cut a 100-foot hole in the top of it. Turn it upside-down, and lower it to the ocean floor. Lower it on top of the oil gusher, so that oil from the gusher will go into the tanker, displacing any air or water in the tanker. If the tanker fills with oil, pipe the surplus oil to another sunken tanker.
According to these images, the tops of tankers aren't completely flat. So the hole in the tanker won't be directly on the ocean floor. Since there will be a gap between the tanker and the ocean floor, there will be room under the tanker to move equipment to the gusher, to close it. While the oil company is closing the gusher, the tanker will collect the oil so that the oil doesn't pollute, and so that it isn't lost.
(If gold instead of oil were washed away, people would rightly complain that our national treasure was being wasted. National treasure is also wasted if oil is dispersed and lost.)
If BP likes another idea better, fine. Whatever idea they decide on, they should test and improve it now, so that they're ready for the next oil spill.
I hope robot companies are doing R&D on how their robots, instead of Ebola care-givers, could do dangerous work.
Gizmodo has an article on robots fighting Ebola. The article lists ways that robots could be used, including removing biowaste, and delivering supplies to people who are healthy but cut off.
Just today, I sat in on a lecture that basically said, engineers can expect about 2 years of work and then be put on the chopping block.
Did the lecturer say anything about jobs that require 5 years experience in order to be hired?
Countries do some things well, and other things badly. Apparently Nigeria has done a good job at stopping Ebola. We should respect that, and learn lessons from them on how to stop it here in the US.
Back around the year 2000, ISPs used to offer free web hosting to their customers. Some ISPs had templates that you could fill in with text and uploaded images, to make it simple to create a web page.
If ISPs still offered that service, and if customers who don't know how to write a web page used the service, then private web sites would be more dispersed, and therefore less tempting to crack. (Also, the customers wouldn't have to give out personal information, besides the info that they already needed to give out for their Internet connection.)
This service should let the customers password-protect their web pages.
This could be a more private and secure service for customers who just want a simple "Hello, this is me" web site.
I wish Apple would hire a security expert, and have him/her work directly for Eddy Que.
Congratulations, India and ISRO. I'm happy about your success, and I wish you well in the future.
I generally like The Onion, but that article bothers me. I'm a white person who has lived my whole life in the US. I've given money to international aid organizations. My last donation (about a month ago) was $1,000 to Doctors Without Borders, which has several doctors in Africa, fighting Ebola.
According to the article "How Nigeria has succeeded in containing Ebola", there's hope that Ebola can be contained. The article tells how leaders including Babatunde Fashola, governor of Lagos state, have put procedures in place to stop the spread of Ebola. Nigeria is a large, populous country. But it has had only 21 cases of Ebola, and nine deaths.
And this is in a country with lots of internal problems. I really hope Boko Haram doesn't mess up their efforts.
I walk for exercise. When I get tired or bored, my speed slows down.
I would like an app that plays music at the speed that I want. I don't know the term, but it's possible to speed up music without changing the key, by taking tiny slices out of the music. For example, to speed up music by 10%, remove 1/100 of a second of the music every tenth of a second. And to slow music down 10%, repeat 1/100 of a second of the music each tenth of a second.
I'd like to adjust the music's tempo to a good walking speed. Then I could walk to the music, one step per beat, and not slow down.
How about this as a way to cut the spread of germs? Pick a surface that lots of people touch, like the handle of a bathroom door. Wash the door handle. Take a washcloth and pump Purell or Germ-X into it. Attach the washcloth to the door handle with clean rubber bands. Every hour, pump more Purell into the washcloth; and every day, replace the washcloth.
Now if I open the door with dirty hands, most germs that I transfer to the washcloth are killed by the Purell. And the Purell in the washcloth will kill lots germs on my hands, so that I will be less likely to spread germs elsewhere.
This isn't a substitute for washing hands. But since kids don't wash hands like they should, it should help.
A doctor would have to approve this. Would someone have an allergic reaction to Purell or Germ-X? Is it safe to touch these gels if you have a cut on your hand?
And some non-medical concerns: If I'm wearing a ring, I don't want the ring to catch on the washcloth as I pull my hand away from the doorknob. (I might lose my finger!) Also there would have to be a carpet under the doorknob. We don't want people to slip on any Purell that drips from the washcloth.
On the other hand, I explicitly recall a statement along the lines of "we aren't going to worry about security until after we get it all up and working first" from one the people running the program. I sure wish I had bookmarked it because it is the kind of thing that is too stupid to believe.
Maybe you're thinking about this: "Among the issues that concerned the government's own technical experts was that security testing could not be completed because the system was undergoing so many last-minute changes."
An article by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) briefly mentions climate change, but the article is mostly about how much ash that would fall on the continental US. The article also says, "... multiple inches of ash can damage buildings, block sewer and water lines, and disrupt livestock and crop production ...".
Those are my main concerns - Ash on the ground disrupting the production of food and clean water and getting them to people, and ash in the atmosphere causing climate change.