Really -- why does it matter? Unless you're planning on using MySpace as a dating service, which is a bad idea for any number of reasons, I don't see why it matters who the actual meatspace person that's behind a particular online avatar matters. It's like asking whether the clerk at the Dunkin Donuts counter is a transsexual, or dyes their hair: maybe they do, maybe they don't. Does it really matter? Is the knowledge really necessary in order to interact with them? Clearly not.
I think there is a bit of an obsession with trying to link online identities to real people; we need to realize that the disconnect between avatars and natural people is both intentional and desired. Who cares whether the controlling entity is male or female, or some particularly well-engineered piece of software -- it doesn't matter.
Keepass, unless I'm missing something big about it, just seems like a fairly nice, open source version of the "encrypted text file" solution. Unfortunately, it doesn't sync across multiple computers, which was the thing I really liked about Google Browser Sync and Firefox. I suppose I could create a database, and then mail it back and forth to myself at work, but that just seems like it's asking for version management issues.
Actually, it looks like there's a converter between Keypass and the program that I use on my aging Palm m100 -- GNU Keyring. The Palm-based solution is the best thing I've found, before I started using GBS, but it's still a pain: in order to keep all those stored passwords safe, you have to use a good master password, and that's obnoxious to type in to the Palm every time you want to recall a password.
I wonder if you could set up something like Keepass, but point it to a file on a remote server, via something like WebDAV so it could have read/write access.
Perhaps even whole idea of encoding alphabets is a relict (and biased to phonetic alphabets, as well)? Today computers have enough power to operate on pictures as UI, so why don't we switch to shape-based data processing?
There is a data-transmission system which works like you describe, used for transmitting text over radio and other high-noise links. It's called "Hellschreiber." Rather than encoding letters as numbers, with a different number for each possible letter in the alphabet, it represents characters as a series of small (7 pixel tall) bitmaps, and then transmits a black/white value for each pixel.
It requires more data than ASCII, since you'd probably need several 7-pixel tall columns to communicate a single letter, but its advantage in radio communications is that it is "fuzzy" -- a one-bit error will just mar the letter, but probably won't make it illegible, or silently swap it for another letter. It lets the human eye and brain do the error correction, rather than trying to do it in filters.
So anyway, good idea; so good, you've been beaten to it by 86 years.:)
I'm not sure where your evidence for this is. I've known a lot of private schools, all of which were non-unionized, and they were all considered to be far superior to the public schools located in the same areas.
Additionally, most of them paid teachers significantly less than public-school teachers. On paper, they should have sucked: non-union, basically no job security if you pissed off the wrong person, long hours, low pay. And yet, they routinely got more qualified instructors -- people who were actual experts in their fields -- and graduated students who went on to be more successful. Why is this? I don't have a totally pat answer for you, but I think that most of their success is because of the institutions themselves: people are willing to go and teach there, even though they're not unionized and the pay is lower, because they're good places to work. Class sizes are smaller, teachers get more freedom to plan lessons and curricula, and the perceived 'quality' of the students (interest, motivation, background education) is higher.
In my experience, unions and the job security that they offer don't do much to attract the best talent. If anything, they attract the mediocre, who are seeking a job that it's difficult to get fired from. Improve working conditions, and you'll probably find more people willing to work who really know their subject and want to teach it. Throwing money at the problem, which is what the unions generally ask for, is not a solution.
If you have 50-100 passwords at various sites, established over years, there's really a shortage of other good options. You can go the old-school route and just write them all down on a pad of paper, or the slightly more sophisticated route and put them in a text file or encrypted database on your local machine, but that doesn't help you when you want to log into a site from another machine.
I was disappointed to hear of this vulnerability, because I use Google Browser Sync pretty heavily for keeping track of cookies and trivial passwords, and to be honest I'm not really sure what I'd do without it. More important passwords I keep in an old Palm Pilot using a GPLed password-management and generation program on it, but recalling passwords from it is a pain (takes several minutes to get Palm out, type in master password, etc.).
I don't see why you couldn't wear one too, and then you'd be able to show your (assumedly) unexpurgated version alongside theirs, and thus prove not only did they do something wrong, but that they attempted to cover it up.
More realistically though, unless you want to be like the gargoyle guy from Snow Crash, totally covered in data-capture gear, what's going to keep law enforcement and government in check are the little cameras on everyone's cellphones. The tasering incident at UCLA is just the beginning; in the next few years as video-cameraphones become more ubiquitous, and ways for sharing the resulting video (Youtube, Flickr, etc.) become totally mainstream, you'll be able to pull out your cameraphone when you see something odd going on, and post it to the web (hopefully with some sort of geotagging and time/date stamping), and suddenly the onus will be on the cops to show exactly what they were doing.
Cameraphones and YouTube are more than just ways to make porn and stupid pet videos, they could be the beginning of a whole new era in the balance of power between common people and the authorities. How the people in power attempt to regulate the use of these technologies should give you a good indication of how threatened they feel by them.
I thought the article's seemingly mandatory 'equal time' counterpoint from "environmentalists" was slightly strange:
French anti-nuclear group Sortir du Nucleaire predicted in a statement Tuesday that the United States could resist, given its refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on fighting global warming.
The group also warned that the project will still produce radioactive waste, though less than conventional nuclear reactors.
Environmental activists, who generally oppose nuclear power, have argued that the project is too costly and would divert attention from current efforts to fight global warming.
Just parsing that out one statement at a time leaves me a bit confused.
The U.S. would resist ratification...because we didn't sign Kyoto...? But we didn't sign Kyoto because we didn't like the economic downsides, not because we as a country somehow like the concept of global warming and are hoping for beachfront property in West Virginia.
The second statement is also fun. So a bunch of nations finally get together and decide to do something that could, someday, potentially give us an alternative to carbon-emitting energy sources, and they pan it as distracting? What gives. Talk about not being happy with anything.
Kind of an interesting point. Maybe we should just let Google run the DNS system, and just replace it with a giant search engine. If we make actually typing in a web address hard enough, then that's what we're effectively doing anyway: people will just start typing everything (including the domain name of sites they want to go to) into the Google Search box at the top of their browser window, instead of the actual address bar.
Actually, DNS arguably is a giant search engine, which simply works on a 1:1 relationship and uses a distributed database (you input one piece of information, and it gives you some corresponding piece of information back). Replacing it with a 'fuzzier' search engine that would give you back a number of results, ranked by relevance, isn't that huge a leap.
I think it's like they're campus security, but then they went and got themselves deputized as police officers. So the have police powers and can act like police, and do most of the things that you'd expect police can do, but they get paid for and have their equipment provided by (and probably, their area of jurisdiction limited to) the University of California.
It's not uncommon for the 'Campus Security' forces at a lot of state universities to be deputized. The universities want "actual" police protection, as opposed to more powerless rent-a-cops, but the local municipalities don't want to pay for more police officers out of the tax budget, or divert police resources from the rest of the community, so basically the universities run a quasi-private police force.
Arrangements like this are more common than you think. On railroads, the Amtrak Police or other transit police ("bulls") are privately employed, but have police powers within their area of jurisdiction. In California, bus companies can do similar things. (At least they could, a while ago.) In most states, they also have to complete regular police training at the State police academy or pass an equivalency test. WP has an interesting discussion here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_police
Basically, the line between 'security officers' and 'police' is blurrier than many people think, and has been for a long time. This isn't a bad thing -- the municipally-employed police don't have the resources to do many of the things that transit/metro/campus police forces do, and it saves a lot of public tax burden as well.
Agreed; the problem is that things that seem like trivial "user training issues" can be very difficult to teach people with memory problems. This is an issue both when dealing with the elderly, and also with the learning disabled; you have to build systems that can deal with people who may not learn and retain information quite as quickly as a 'normal' person would.
I think the key here is to teach all the important basics about not clicking on links in emails, but also try to design the system so that it reinforces these lessons and helps remind them if they start to forget.
For starters, get them an email client that can disable HTML, and turn that off. If they can't click on a link in an email and have their browser pop open, then it's a lot harder to get roped in by a phishing attack -- if they have to copy/paste it, at least there's a better chance they'll realize something is amiss. Might also want to think about literally putting a sticker on the computer that says something like "Only open banking sites from bookmarks, never links!" (okay, I'm sure someone else can come up with some catchier one-liners for warning text than I can). I feel like if everyone had a sign on the top of their screen reminding them of the dangers of phishing, maybe they'd think about it more and maybe avoid trouble once in a while.
The other thing that might be instructive would be to take them online and show them some samples of phishing emails and 419 scams and general spam, so that they know what they're probably going to receive in their Inbox, sooner or later, and how hard it is to separate from "legitimate" seeming emails. Maybe forward them an example one yourself (warn them first, and defang the links obviously); it's easy to talk about scamming or phishing in the abstract, but it suddenly becomes more real when you have one in your email box.
Any success with this project is going to require a combination of technological and user-training solutions; neither one is going to be enough on its own. The system has to help reinforce the lessons, preferably by making the "right way" of doing things also the easiest and most obvious way, and making the "wrong way" harder.
Fascinating; thanks for the link. As much as I've used servo and feedback networks in hobby applications, I've never really delved into their design very much. It would make a lot of sense if the heli gyros used a control system like that, since they're essentially no different from any other type of industrial-control feedback loop.
Cancer cells are alive, too, you insensitive clod!
What kind of a society are we, if we murder cancer cells, just because they're "inconvenient" or "unwanted." Cancer is just God's way of saying that he wants more of you around to love!
Reminds me of a non-computer example.
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Reminds me a little of the first electronics class I ever took, back in the day. First thing the instructor had us do was hook up a resistor to a variac, and increase the voltage until we smoked the resistor. Just so we would have all have done it, knew what it smelled like and looked like.
Sometimes the best way to get over your fear of doing something wrong, is to be forced to do it, and realize it's not that big a deal.
Probably a very smart teaching strategy on that man's part.
Any kid who ever built a Van De Graff generator has played with far more than 40kV... I mean, that's only a few centimeters worth of spark at STP. If you've ever gotten 3-4" sparks in dry air, you're playing with way higher voltage than that.
I think you're confusing deuterium with plain old hydrogen. You can extract hydrogen from water with electrolysis, but separating the deuterium (representing a vanishingly small percentage of the liberated hydrogen) from that would still be, to put it mildly, less than trivial.
IIRC, commercial heavy water plants do something that takes advantage of the slight difference in boiling point between D2O and H2O, and do a very delicate fractional distillation, over and over and over. The energy involved to do it is pretty immense, and it would be tough to do except under very carefully controlled conditions. Hydrogen sulfide may also be involved at some point in the process, as well, at least according to this WP article.
I've seen cops and bar bouncers smack around people on various occasions, some of them deserving, some of them probably not, and in each case there were people standing around and watching. I've never seen anyone who wasn't directly connected in some way to the person getting the beating involve themselves unnecessarily.
Most people will happily stand back and watch Bad Things Happening To Other People Who Probably Deserve It Somehow. It's probably humanity's oldest form of entertainment.
To most of the people in that library, the whole thing was just like watching COPS, but in the ultra-ultra high definition sometimes known as Reality(TM).
Not that it's a particularly big market or anything, but MEMS gyros are also used in R/C helicopters as a stabilization/pilot-assist device. They keep the tail of the helicopter pointed in basically the same direction, by adjusting the pitch of the tail rotor dynamically. Without a gyro, the pilot has to constantly make this adjustment in real-time, or risk putting the heli into a spin.
For somewhere around $90-120, you can run out today and get yourself a single-axis "Silicon Micro Machine" gyro that's set up to output a signal to control a standard hobby position servo. The gain on most of them is adjustable, but I assume that you could set it up so that the magnitude of the signal was basically proportional to the deviation from a particular position. Might be a little easier for a hobbyist than going the total DIY route from raw parts.
I don't think so. The application can be linked against a single graphics library. The GL just swaps some function pointers when special hardware is available.
It seems like this problem must have been one that's been solved before. How do people write code for processors that have vector engines, like IBM's AltiVec or its Intel equivalent?
I'm now convinced that America has no friends in the middle east- only trading partners controlled by the enemy of us all, the petroleum corporations.
Of course America has no "friends" in the Middle East, at least not unless you count Israel. But why should we? I don't mean this in terms of 'america is evil, blah blah blah,' but in terms of what, exactly, do Americans and most people in the Middle East (Muslims in particular) have in common, in terms of political philosophy? Precious little, at least from where I'm sitting.
A secular government, where religious freedom is taken for granted, and the government draws its power and legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and not from a mandate from God, is one of the cornerstones of Western society. Every schoolchild in the U.S. can (or at least, should) be able to tell you that the separation of Church and State is one of the keys to our whole system.
If you went to most places in the Middle East and asked average people about their thoughts on religious freedom, I'm not sure that you would find wide support for governments that didn't base themselves on religion. In the same way that a secular government is just assumed in the West, I think in the Mideast (excepting Israel, which is for all intents and purposes Western), an asecular quasi-theocracy would just as easily be assumed. A government that didn't recognize and allow for some form of Sharia law or have an Islamic-derived constitution would be a non-starter in many places.
Expecting these two philosophies to coexist as "friends" is ridiculous. They're not compatible, nor reconcilable: they begin from radically different assumptions about the function and place of religion and government. Barring a few million Muslim people waking up one day and deciding that, yes, religion should definitely take a back-seat to government, the U.S. will never have any "friends" in the Muslim world: it cannot. At most, the East and West ought to be able to tolerate and trade peaceably with each other, agreeing to disagree in public while probably scorning the other afterwards in private, and hopefully finding common ground on particular issues of mutual geopolitical advantage.
But expecting the U.S. to ever have a relationship, as a nation, with Jordan or Saudi Arabia, as it does with Great Britain or Israel is silly. It's not going to happen: Western nations are just much closer to each other on a host of fundamental political and philosophical issues.
My point is that Egypt, like many other countries "The West" criticizes, has much bigger issues to deal with than freedom of speech.
I agree with all your points, right up until you said this. I don't think that any of the other issues that you mentioned, are necessarily more important than freedom of speech. If anything, freedom of speech is their biggest issue, and in order to secure that, they'd need to fix the rest of their government: because a corrupt government generally isn't conducive to a free society (because corrupt governments generally hate when people point out how corrupt they are). Corruption and lack of freedom go hand-in-hand.
Conversely, a major step towards fixing all those other problems you mentioned, would be more government transparency, and a freer civil society. Cleanup and restoration of a free society also go together.
They're not separate issues. Freedom of speech shouldn't be minimized as an issue, because other parts of the government are equally fucked.
A quick check of the nickname Ayyoub shows that the original Tareq Ayyoub was a reporter at al Jazeera who was killed by American missiles when the station was struck during the invasion of Baghdad. It's a short jump to see that someone fanning anti-American sentiment would take the same name for the purpose of rabble rousing. Who stands to gain the most from such anti-Westernism in the West? The socialist party. A quick check shows that this Ayyoub blogger is a radical socialist. How's that for a coincidence?
Anyway, if you defend this guy, you're being played like a fiddle by the very forces that seek to destroy Western culture. Happy defending, Free Speechnauts!
Actually, as a Westerner, I'm significantly more concerned about ultra-right-wing, religo-fascists stifling all debate by imprisoning people for their political speech, than I am about a bunch of leftist Socialists. So what if the guy was a radical socialist? We've dealt with radical socialists before -- at least they can be argued with in something approaching rational discussion. You can't have a whole lot of discussion with someone who thinks they're doing God's work by destroying the unbelievers.
I'll take athiest secularists -- of any political philosophy or stripe -- any day, versus any nonsecular religious wingnut who wants to destroy the separation of church (whether it's Islam or Christianity) and state.
A whole lot of the problems that exist right now in the world, can be traced back to foreign policy decisions on the part of the West, where we decided to fund or otherwise support religious nuts of various flavors, in order to indirectly get at our political enemies at the time, the Soviet Union. However, in retrospect, I think that we'll find that radical Islam is probably a far more insidious enemy than Communism ever was. Pandering to religious fanatics is what got us into the mess we're in right now, and they're not something you can argue with on any sort of rational plane.
I'll take a political radical over a religious radical any day of the week. At least there's hope of rational discussion -- or at least conceptual understanding -- of the political adversary; with the religious radical, since there's no rational basis to begin with, there can't be any discussion or compromise.
I'm a strong supporter of rights to free speech, and I was really reading the thread in preparation of making a comment on how this incident in Egypt is an excellent example of how "hate speech" (in the example, the allegation of 'inciting religious hatred') can be used to arbitrarily curtail speech. This could easily happen in the U.S. in Europe; anyone who "rocks the boat" or causes controversy or offends someone else could find themselves slapped with a 'hate speech' violation.
However, with that said, I don't think it's right or proper to restrict what private organizations, compromised of individuals by their own free association (specifically, not unions or other groups into which membership is mandatory for some people), do within their own organization. If you say something critical of an organization you're in, and they decide to censure you / throw you out, that's their business and yours. Unless there's some contract between them and you, so that it would become a contract-law dispute, I don't see that there's a public interest in regulating that. (Although I could see carving out exceptions for whistle-blowers, but even then I'm not convinced, since that could be done anonymously: if you do it publicly so as to take credit, although you shouldn't be punished, I'm not sure you should necessarily be shielded from the company letting you go, either.)
So if some blogger revealed privileged information in his blog, and as a result his party tossed him out, that's not a free speech issue. The government didn't come down on him -- if it had, then I'd have a problem with it. There is a right to association which is important, in addition to the right to free speech: if you say that groups cannot control their own membership, then you cheapen and chip away at the right to association, by making membership a meaningless concept. People have a right to associate -- and disassociate themselves -- with and from whomever they choose, for whatever reasons they choose, unless there is a very compelling public interest in regulating it.
Slashdot Mirror
How are you supposed to know if it's really them?
Why do you care?
Really -- why does it matter? Unless you're planning on using MySpace as a dating service, which is a bad idea for any number of reasons, I don't see why it matters who the actual meatspace person that's behind a particular online avatar matters. It's like asking whether the clerk at the Dunkin Donuts counter is a transsexual, or dyes their hair: maybe they do, maybe they don't. Does it really matter? Is the knowledge really necessary in order to interact with them? Clearly not.
I think there is a bit of an obsession with trying to link online identities to real people; we need to realize that the disconnect between avatars and natural people is both intentional and desired. Who cares whether the controlling entity is male or female, or some particularly well-engineered piece of software -- it doesn't matter.
Keepass, unless I'm missing something big about it, just seems like a fairly nice, open source version of the "encrypted text file" solution. Unfortunately, it doesn't sync across multiple computers, which was the thing I really liked about Google Browser Sync and Firefox. I suppose I could create a database, and then mail it back and forth to myself at work, but that just seems like it's asking for version management issues.
Actually, it looks like there's a converter between Keypass and the program that I use on my aging Palm m100 -- GNU Keyring. The Palm-based solution is the best thing I've found, before I started using GBS, but it's still a pain: in order to keep all those stored passwords safe, you have to use a good master password, and that's obnoxious to type in to the Palm every time you want to recall a password.
I wonder if you could set up something like Keepass, but point it to a file on a remote server, via something like WebDAV so it could have read/write access.
It requires more data than ASCII, since you'd probably need several 7-pixel tall columns to communicate a single letter, but its advantage in radio communications is that it is "fuzzy" -- a one-bit error will just mar the letter, but probably won't make it illegible, or silently swap it for another letter. It lets the human eye and brain do the error correction, rather than trying to do it in filters.
So anyway, good idea; so good, you've been beaten to it by 86 years.
I'm not sure where your evidence for this is. I've known a lot of private schools, all of which were non-unionized, and they were all considered to be far superior to the public schools located in the same areas.
Additionally, most of them paid teachers significantly less than public-school teachers. On paper, they should have sucked: non-union, basically no job security if you pissed off the wrong person, long hours, low pay. And yet, they routinely got more qualified instructors -- people who were actual experts in their fields -- and graduated students who went on to be more successful. Why is this? I don't have a totally pat answer for you, but I think that most of their success is because of the institutions themselves: people are willing to go and teach there, even though they're not unionized and the pay is lower, because they're good places to work. Class sizes are smaller, teachers get more freedom to plan lessons and curricula, and the perceived 'quality' of the students (interest, motivation, background education) is higher.
In my experience, unions and the job security that they offer don't do much to attract the best talent. If anything, they attract the mediocre, who are seeking a job that it's difficult to get fired from. Improve working conditions, and you'll probably find more people willing to work who really know their subject and want to teach it. Throwing money at the problem, which is what the unions generally ask for, is not a solution.
If you have 50-100 passwords at various sites, established over years, there's really a shortage of other good options. You can go the old-school route and just write them all down on a pad of paper, or the slightly more sophisticated route and put them in a text file or encrypted database on your local machine, but that doesn't help you when you want to log into a site from another machine.
I was disappointed to hear of this vulnerability, because I use Google Browser Sync pretty heavily for keeping track of cookies and trivial passwords, and to be honest I'm not really sure what I'd do without it. More important passwords I keep in an old Palm Pilot using a GPLed password-management and generation program on it, but recalling passwords from it is a pain (takes several minutes to get Palm out, type in master password, etc.).
No way. Everyone knows Porn >> Games in the scheme of cosmic importance!
I don't see why you couldn't wear one too, and then you'd be able to show your (assumedly) unexpurgated version alongside theirs, and thus prove not only did they do something wrong, but that they attempted to cover it up.
More realistically though, unless you want to be like the gargoyle guy from Snow Crash, totally covered in data-capture gear, what's going to keep law enforcement and government in check are the little cameras on everyone's cellphones. The tasering incident at UCLA is just the beginning; in the next few years as video-cameraphones become more ubiquitous, and ways for sharing the resulting video (Youtube, Flickr, etc.) become totally mainstream, you'll be able to pull out your cameraphone when you see something odd going on, and post it to the web (hopefully with some sort of geotagging and time/date stamping), and suddenly the onus will be on the cops to show exactly what they were doing.
Cameraphones and YouTube are more than just ways to make porn and stupid pet videos, they could be the beginning of a whole new era in the balance of power between common people and the authorities. How the people in power attempt to regulate the use of these technologies should give you a good indication of how threatened they feel by them.
The U.S. would resist ratification...because we didn't sign Kyoto...? But we didn't sign Kyoto because we didn't like the economic downsides, not because we as a country somehow like the concept of global warming and are hoping for beachfront property in West Virginia.
The second statement is also fun. So a bunch of nations finally get together and decide to do something that could, someday, potentially give us an alternative to carbon-emitting energy sources, and they pan it as distracting? What gives. Talk about not being happy with anything.
Kind of an interesting point. Maybe we should just let Google run the DNS system, and just replace it with a giant search engine. If we make actually typing in a web address hard enough, then that's what we're effectively doing anyway: people will just start typing everything (including the domain name of sites they want to go to) into the Google Search box at the top of their browser window, instead of the actual address bar.
Actually, DNS arguably is a giant search engine, which simply works on a 1:1 relationship and uses a distributed database (you input one piece of information, and it gives you some corresponding piece of information back). Replacing it with a 'fuzzier' search engine that would give you back a number of results, ranked by relevance, isn't that huge a leap.
In Maine, you can't hunt deer on Sundays.
I guess they just figured that sniping the deer while they were all on their way to church on Sunday morning would just be unsporting or something.
It's made in Canada!
... Canadian chips have better cooling.
Of course
I think it's like they're campus security, but then they went and got themselves deputized as police officers. So the have police powers and can act like police, and do most of the things that you'd expect police can do, but they get paid for and have their equipment provided by (and probably, their area of jurisdiction limited to) the University of California.
It's not uncommon for the 'Campus Security' forces at a lot of state universities to be deputized. The universities want "actual" police protection, as opposed to more powerless rent-a-cops, but the local municipalities don't want to pay for more police officers out of the tax budget, or divert police resources from the rest of the community, so basically the universities run a quasi-private police force.
Arrangements like this are more common than you think. On railroads, the Amtrak Police or other transit police ("bulls") are privately employed, but have police powers within their area of jurisdiction. In California, bus companies can do similar things. (At least they could, a while ago.) In most states, they also have to complete regular police training at the State police academy or pass an equivalency test. WP has an interesting discussion here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_police
Basically, the line between 'security officers' and 'police' is blurrier than many people think, and has been for a long time. This isn't a bad thing -- the municipally-employed police don't have the resources to do many of the things that transit/metro/campus police forces do, and it saves a lot of public tax burden as well.
Agreed; the problem is that things that seem like trivial "user training issues" can be very difficult to teach people with memory problems. This is an issue both when dealing with the elderly, and also with the learning disabled; you have to build systems that can deal with people who may not learn and retain information quite as quickly as a 'normal' person would.
I think the key here is to teach all the important basics about not clicking on links in emails, but also try to design the system so that it reinforces these lessons and helps remind them if they start to forget.
For starters, get them an email client that can disable HTML, and turn that off. If they can't click on a link in an email and have their browser pop open, then it's a lot harder to get roped in by a phishing attack -- if they have to copy/paste it, at least there's a better chance they'll realize something is amiss. Might also want to think about literally putting a sticker on the computer that says something like "Only open banking sites from bookmarks, never links!" (okay, I'm sure someone else can come up with some catchier one-liners for warning text than I can). I feel like if everyone had a sign on the top of their screen reminding them of the dangers of phishing, maybe they'd think about it more and maybe avoid trouble once in a while.
The other thing that might be instructive would be to take them online and show them some samples of phishing emails and 419 scams and general spam, so that they know what they're probably going to receive in their Inbox, sooner or later, and how hard it is to separate from "legitimate" seeming emails. Maybe forward them an example one yourself (warn them first, and defang the links obviously); it's easy to talk about scamming or phishing in the abstract, but it suddenly becomes more real when you have one in your email box.
Any success with this project is going to require a combination of technological and user-training solutions; neither one is going to be enough on its own. The system has to help reinforce the lessons, preferably by making the "right way" of doing things also the easiest and most obvious way, and making the "wrong way" harder.
Fascinating; thanks for the link. As much as I've used servo and feedback networks in hobby applications, I've never really delved into their design very much. It would make a lot of sense if the heli gyros used a control system like that, since they're essentially no different from any other type of industrial-control feedback loop.
Cancer cells are alive, too, you insensitive clod!
What kind of a society are we, if we murder cancer cells, just because they're "inconvenient" or "unwanted." Cancer is just God's way of saying that he wants more of you around to love!
Reminds me a little of the first electronics class I ever took, back in the day. First thing the instructor had us do was hook up a resistor to a variac, and increase the voltage until we smoked the resistor. Just so we would have all have done it, knew what it smelled like and looked like.
Sometimes the best way to get over your fear of doing something wrong, is to be forced to do it, and realize it's not that big a deal.
Probably a very smart teaching strategy on that man's part.
Any kid who ever built a Van De Graff generator has played with far more than 40kV... I mean, that's only a few centimeters worth of spark at STP. If you've ever gotten 3-4" sparks in dry air, you're playing with way higher voltage than that.
I think you're confusing deuterium with plain old hydrogen. You can extract hydrogen from water with electrolysis, but separating the deuterium (representing a vanishingly small percentage of the liberated hydrogen) from that would still be, to put it mildly, less than trivial.
IIRC, commercial heavy water plants do something that takes advantage of the slight difference in boiling point between D2O and H2O, and do a very delicate fractional distillation, over and over and over. The energy involved to do it is pretty immense, and it would be tough to do except under very carefully controlled conditions. Hydrogen sulfide may also be involved at some point in the process, as well, at least according to this WP article.
And this surprises you ... why?
I've seen cops and bar bouncers smack around people on various occasions, some of them deserving, some of them probably not, and in each case there were people standing around and watching. I've never seen anyone who wasn't directly connected in some way to the person getting the beating involve themselves unnecessarily.
Most people will happily stand back and watch Bad Things Happening To Other People Who Probably Deserve It Somehow. It's probably humanity's oldest form of entertainment.
To most of the people in that library, the whole thing was just like watching COPS, but in the ultra-ultra high definition sometimes known as Reality(TM).
Not that it's a particularly big market or anything, but MEMS gyros are also used in R/C helicopters as a stabilization/pilot-assist device. They keep the tail of the helicopter pointed in basically the same direction, by adjusting the pitch of the tail rotor dynamically. Without a gyro, the pilot has to constantly make this adjustment in real-time, or risk putting the heli into a spin.
For somewhere around $90-120, you can run out today and get yourself a single-axis "Silicon Micro Machine" gyro that's set up to output a signal to control a standard hobby position servo. The gain on most of them is adjustable, but I assume that you could set it up so that the magnitude of the signal was basically proportional to the deviation from a particular position. Might be a little easier for a hobbyist than going the total DIY route from raw parts.
I don't think so. The application can be linked against a single graphics library. The GL just swaps some function pointers when special hardware is available.
It seems like this problem must have been one that's been solved before. How do people write code for processors that have vector engines, like IBM's AltiVec or its Intel equivalent?
I'm now convinced that America has no friends in the middle east- only trading partners controlled by the enemy of us all, the petroleum corporations.
Of course America has no "friends" in the Middle East, at least not unless you count Israel. But why should we? I don't mean this in terms of 'america is evil, blah blah blah,' but in terms of what, exactly, do Americans and most people in the Middle East (Muslims in particular) have in common, in terms of political philosophy? Precious little, at least from where I'm sitting.
A secular government, where religious freedom is taken for granted, and the government draws its power and legitimacy from the consent of the governed, and not from a mandate from God, is one of the cornerstones of Western society. Every schoolchild in the U.S. can (or at least, should) be able to tell you that the separation of Church and State is one of the keys to our whole system.
If you went to most places in the Middle East and asked average people about their thoughts on religious freedom, I'm not sure that you would find wide support for governments that didn't base themselves on religion. In the same way that a secular government is just assumed in the West, I think in the Mideast (excepting Israel, which is for all intents and purposes Western), an asecular quasi-theocracy would just as easily be assumed. A government that didn't recognize and allow for some form of Sharia law or have an Islamic-derived constitution would be a non-starter in many places.
Expecting these two philosophies to coexist as "friends" is ridiculous. They're not compatible, nor reconcilable: they begin from radically different assumptions about the function and place of religion and government. Barring a few million Muslim people waking up one day and deciding that, yes, religion should definitely take a back-seat to government, the U.S. will never have any "friends" in the Muslim world: it cannot. At most, the East and West ought to be able to tolerate and trade peaceably with each other, agreeing to disagree in public while probably scorning the other afterwards in private, and hopefully finding common ground on particular issues of mutual geopolitical advantage.
But expecting the U.S. to ever have a relationship, as a nation, with Jordan or Saudi Arabia, as it does with Great Britain or Israel is silly. It's not going to happen: Western nations are just much closer to each other on a host of fundamental political and philosophical issues.
My point is that Egypt, like many other countries "The West" criticizes, has much bigger issues to deal with than freedom of speech.
I agree with all your points, right up until you said this. I don't think that any of the other issues that you mentioned, are necessarily more important than freedom of speech. If anything, freedom of speech is their biggest issue, and in order to secure that, they'd need to fix the rest of their government: because a corrupt government generally isn't conducive to a free society (because corrupt governments generally hate when people point out how corrupt they are). Corruption and lack of freedom go hand-in-hand.
Conversely, a major step towards fixing all those other problems you mentioned, would be more government transparency, and a freer civil society. Cleanup and restoration of a free society also go together.
They're not separate issues. Freedom of speech shouldn't be minimized as an issue, because other parts of the government are equally fucked.
I'll take athiest secularists -- of any political philosophy or stripe -- any day, versus any nonsecular religious wingnut who wants to destroy the separation of church (whether it's Islam or Christianity) and state.
A whole lot of the problems that exist right now in the world, can be traced back to foreign policy decisions on the part of the West, where we decided to fund or otherwise support religious nuts of various flavors, in order to indirectly get at our political enemies at the time, the Soviet Union. However, in retrospect, I think that we'll find that radical Islam is probably a far more insidious enemy than Communism ever was. Pandering to religious fanatics is what got us into the mess we're in right now, and they're not something you can argue with on any sort of rational plane.
I'll take a political radical over a religious radical any day of the week. At least there's hope of rational discussion -- or at least conceptual understanding -- of the political adversary; with the religious radical, since there's no rational basis to begin with, there can't be any discussion or compromise.
I'm a strong supporter of rights to free speech, and I was really reading the thread in preparation of making a comment on how this incident in Egypt is an excellent example of how "hate speech" (in the example, the allegation of 'inciting religious hatred') can be used to arbitrarily curtail speech. This could easily happen in the U.S. in Europe; anyone who "rocks the boat" or causes controversy or offends someone else could find themselves slapped with a 'hate speech' violation.
However, with that said, I don't think it's right or proper to restrict what private organizations, compromised of individuals by their own free association (specifically, not unions or other groups into which membership is mandatory for some people), do within their own organization. If you say something critical of an organization you're in, and they decide to censure you / throw you out, that's their business and yours. Unless there's some contract between them and you, so that it would become a contract-law dispute, I don't see that there's a public interest in regulating that. (Although I could see carving out exceptions for whistle-blowers, but even then I'm not convinced, since that could be done anonymously: if you do it publicly so as to take credit, although you shouldn't be punished, I'm not sure you should necessarily be shielded from the company letting you go, either.)
So if some blogger revealed privileged information in his blog, and as a result his party tossed him out, that's not a free speech issue. The government didn't come down on him -- if it had, then I'd have a problem with it. There is a right to association which is important, in addition to the right to free speech: if you say that groups cannot control their own membership, then you cheapen and chip away at the right to association, by making membership a meaningless concept. People have a right to associate -- and disassociate themselves -- with and from whomever they choose, for whatever reasons they choose, unless there is a very compelling public interest in regulating it.