The funny thing is that villagers like these use enormous amounts of fuel and create tremendous pollution (per-capita, anyway) with their snowmobiles and poorly insulated houses. And how many times do you figure the lawyer pushing them into this suit has flown in from Boston?
I do love the part where they're complaining that global warming is keeping them from hunting "whale, seal, walrus, and caribou". Maybe Leonardo diCaprio should make a movie about that!
Are you contractually obligated to applaud, shout, and carry on?
Judging from the photo, it's not a very demanding job.
I'm in the neighborhood, and wouldn't have minded getting paid to stop by for a nap, although preferably not on Camo Dude's shoulder. And I'd have happily complained about RCN for free!
To see if this has been enabled in your area, try visiting www.jkshdfkljh23sadf.com (or something else random) in your web browser.
Are there failed DNS requests any more? I'd thought every combination of characters had its own ad farm by now. If the last few unused ones now also direct to some random ads, I doubt I'd even notice.
Who clicks on those things, anyway? You land on ebaaaaaay.com when your 'a' key sticks and think "Yes, I do want a beautiful Russian bride!"?
It's worth noting that unlike the typical NewYorkCountryLawyer story gloating about how the RIAA lost some motion on some case somewhere, this is a potentially major development.
"Kudos" is not plural, just a word that happens to end in "s", like "pathos". "Kudo", as used on that site, is as meaningless as "etho" or "mytho". The more frequent references to "many kudos" or other treatments of it as discontinuous are also incorrect, although much less jarring.
At any rate, I was mistaken -- while some of the wilder claims of botnet size are in the millions, realistic estimates put even the largest in the low six figures. So the OP is correct that the figure given here is rather improbable.
I dunno -- is a million nodes especially large for a botnet? It seems consistent with the various botnet stories linked here, and quite conservative compared to the usual estimates here of the prevalence of compromised Windows systems (i.e. all of them, if not more).
We don't want to be in a situation in a few years similar to that with fast food or tobacco today.
Apparently the nanny staters have proceeded to the point where their nonsense about fast food isn't no longer a scare tactic, but the benchmark by which to define some new scare tactic!
So if your employer wrote down in a policy that employees were not allowed to breathe...
The contest for Worst Analogy For This Story would seem to be between you and "However on the surface it does strike me as being awfully similar to a garbage man who works for a private waste management company, volunteering his time on saturdays on the Adopt-A-Highway program, cleaning up trash."
We'll see if Bad Analogy Guy shows up to contest this one.
Not only was that observation made within the first few comments when the story was initially posted here, it was made in the freaking tags to the story!
It's been clear for years that Cringely has been slipping, but now he can't even keep up with the sort of dullards who have just tagged the Feynman article with "fineman".
It wasn't just them -- between Incyte, DoubleTwist, HGS and other companies, they probably patented at least ten times as many genes as are now believed to exist.
The CEO of this new Mozilla Messaging company writes the most insightful blog post containing the most hopeful look at the future of messaging...
Out of curiosity, what do you think is so insightful about it? Ascher seems enthusiastic, and a pleasant guy to work for, but I didn't see any specific novel ideas in there, just a lot of "Email is important...room for improvement...add useful features...listen to our users" boilerplate.
It also struck me as odd that a decade after Netscape stuck email into the web browser and few years after Firefox stripped it back out, he's proposing to put it back in!
The name DoubleTwist has been used for a decade by a bioinformatics company (where it makes a lot more sense), but Johansen seems to have gotten the doubletwist.com domain away from them. I guess that given his manifest concern for intellectual property rights, it was obvious that he'd have gotten his legal ducks in a row.
(Trying to find a link, I see this old NYT story about how they discovered 105,000 of the 20,000 human genes we have today. Those were the days, huh?)
I have no idea, and in hindsight it doesn't seem unreasonable that they were preparing the public disclosure and only decided at that point to test it in other browsers.
I was just responding to the people ridiculing the idea of Mozilla testing in Opera at all, when it's obvious that in this particular case they did.
The alternative being to inform Opera as soon as they realized it was affected, not at the last minute before public disclosure. (Presuming they didn't first test in in Opera right before public disclosure, which might have been the case.)
Clearly, the Mozilla team should be performing full regression testing on every bug they fix against every browser known to man.
I think the point is that they *did* know that this particular vulnerability affected Opera and took their time about telling them.
It still doesn't seem like a huge deal, but on the other hand if you read what the Opera guy actually wrote, it also doesn't seem like a huge deal. "Screeches" seems a bit excessive.
Why the summary decided to single out China, I don't know. I'm sure if a guy with binoculars can do it, so can just about every government in the world, including the United States government.
If you RTFA (or even if you don't) it's perfectly obvious that your point is precisely the one being made in the article, not that the Chinese and some space buff are the only people with binoculars.
to claim that nosy neighbors in your locality (neighbors who only know what you tell them or do in front of them when you can clearly see that they can observe you) is the same thing as having a centralized, automated databases of millions of people is just plain absurd.
Sorry, but both halves of this are wrong. One, you have no idea what life in a village is like, and two, when everyone you know knows everything about you that you don't go to elaborate lengths to conceal, it's irrelevant that there aren't millions of other people for them to know about as well.
(It's relevant for other discussions we could have; it's certainly not relevant to the original AC's view of the world.)
Like... advising them not to bite on phishing emails, instead of telling them to foil the NSA by sending encrypted emails none of their recipients will ever be able to read.
Except that it's only a very recent development that it's possible to correlate so much information on so many aspects of individuals.
No, you're making the same mistake as the "You're a complete asshole who is missing the point" guy, albeit much more courteously. Historically, your neighbors knew everything about you. It's only in the last couple of centuries that that's changed.
You're a complete asshole who is missing the point, yet some idiot mod will see your low userID number and automatically mod you up.
Perhaps you should reserve this opening statement for something less preposterously moronic than "For most of human history, it used to be that knowing very much about somebody was a difficult and expensive undertaking, as you would have had to actually physically observe them and follow them around and investigate them."
Before the rise of large cities and mass transportation, it was an expensive luxury to live in a way where you *didn't* know the intimate details of your neighbors' lives. You didn't have to follow them around -- there was no place for them to go!
Slashdot Mirror
In my experience, finding a headhunter who is even vaguely honest is more difficult than finding good programmers. How are you choosing them?
I do love the part where they're complaining that global warming is keeping them from hunting "whale, seal, walrus, and caribou". Maybe Leonardo diCaprio should make a movie about that!
This whole thing seems like an April Fools joke that was accidentally distributed a month early.
Judging from the photo, it's not a very demanding job.
I'm in the neighborhood, and wouldn't have minded getting paid to stop by for a nap, although preferably not on Camo Dude's shoulder. And I'd have happily complained about RCN for free!
Are there failed DNS requests any more? I'd thought every combination of characters had its own ad farm by now. If the last few unused ones now also direct to some random ads, I doubt I'd even notice.
Who clicks on those things, anyway? You land on ebaaaaaay.com when your 'a' key sticks and think "Yes, I do want a beautiful Russian bride!"?
It's worth noting that unlike the typical NewYorkCountryLawyer story gloating about how the RIAA lost some motion on some case somewhere, this is a potentially major development.
People who have to work in airplane seats, i.e. exactly the target audience of the Lenovo.
"Kudos" is not plural, just a word that happens to end in "s", like "pathos". "Kudo", as used on that site, is as meaningless as "etho" or "mytho". The more frequent references to "many kudos" or other treatments of it as discontinuous are also incorrect, although much less jarring.
At any rate, I was mistaken -- while some of the wilder claims of botnet size are in the millions, realistic estimates put even the largest in the low six figures. So the OP is correct that the figure given here is rather improbable.
I dunno -- is a million nodes especially large for a botnet? It seems consistent with the various botnet stories linked here, and quite conservative compared to the usual estimates here of the prevalence of compromised Windows systems (i.e. all of them, if not more).
Apparently the nanny staters have proceeded to the point where their nonsense about fast food isn't no longer a scare tactic, but the benchmark by which to define some new scare tactic!
Nice try there, Johnny Canuck, but watch the spelling next time.
The contest for Worst Analogy For This Story would seem to be between you and "However on the surface it does strike me as being awfully similar to a garbage man who works for a private waste management company, volunteering his time on saturdays on the Adopt-A-Highway program, cleaning up trash."
We'll see if Bad Analogy Guy shows up to contest this one.
It's been clear for years that Cringely has been slipping, but now he can't even keep up with the sort of dullards who have just tagged the Feynman article with "fineman".
It wasn't just them -- between Incyte, DoubleTwist, HGS and other companies, they probably patented at least ten times as many genes as are now believed to exist.
Out of curiosity, what do you think is so insightful about it? Ascher seems enthusiastic, and a pleasant guy to work for, but I didn't see any specific novel ideas in there, just a lot of "Email is important...room for improvement...add useful features...listen to our users" boilerplate.
It also struck me as odd that a decade after Netscape stuck email into the web browser and few years after Firefox stripped it back out, he's proposing to put it back in!
(Trying to find a link, I see this old NYT story about how they discovered 105,000 of the 20,000 human genes we have today. Those were the days, huh?)
I have no idea, and in hindsight it doesn't seem unreasonable that they were preparing the public disclosure and only decided at that point to test it in other browsers.
I was just responding to the people ridiculing the idea of Mozilla testing in Opera at all, when it's obvious that in this particular case they did.
The alternative being to inform Opera as soon as they realized it was affected, not at the last minute before public disclosure. (Presuming they didn't first test in in Opera right before public disclosure, which might have been the case.)
I think the point is that they *did* know that this particular vulnerability affected Opera and took their time about telling them.
It still doesn't seem like a huge deal, but on the other hand if you read what the Opera guy actually wrote, it also doesn't seem like a huge deal. "Screeches" seems a bit excessive.
If true, which may well not be the case, that's got to have a pretty big load of bad karma attached to it...
If you RTFA (or even if you don't) it's perfectly obvious that your point is precisely the one being made in the article, not that the Chinese and some space buff are the only people with binoculars.
Sorry, but both halves of this are wrong. One, you have no idea what life in a village is like, and two, when everyone you know knows everything about you that you don't go to elaborate lengths to conceal, it's irrelevant that there aren't millions of other people for them to know about as well.
(It's relevant for other discussions we could have; it's certainly not relevant to the original AC's view of the world.)
Like ... advising them not to bite on phishing emails, instead of telling them to foil the NSA by sending encrypted emails none of their recipients will ever be able to read.
Except that it's only a very recent development that it's possible to correlate so much information on so many aspects of individuals.
No, you're making the same mistake as the "You're a complete asshole who is missing the point" guy, albeit much more courteously. Historically, your neighbors knew everything about you. It's only in the last couple of centuries that that's changed.
Perhaps you should reserve this opening statement for something less preposterously moronic than "For most of human history, it used to be that knowing very much about somebody was a difficult and expensive undertaking, as you would have had to actually physically observe them and follow them around and investigate them."
Before the rise of large cities and mass transportation, it was an expensive luxury to live in a way where you *didn't* know the intimate details of your neighbors' lives. You didn't have to follow them around -- there was no place for them to go!