On the other hand, what with FaceTime being a new thing entirely (instead of taking one of the existing open ones, such as Google's video chat XMPP extensions), and locked down tight so far despite all the promises, I have a bad feeling about this...
Indeed they still haven't delivered on the "open standards" bit of Facetime by documenting what is in it, this is annoying but what is in Facetime is by no means a "new thing entirely". What a wee bit of packet sniffing has revealed is interesting, only the directory service is proprietary, the rest is a combination of SIP, STUN, MPEG4 AVC and several other firewall passing methods that are pretty well documented. I suspect what has happened is that it's all been ready to release, and then either someone has realised that the directory service can be spoofed or some silly person in sales thinks they can improve iThing sales by keeping it locked up.
But don't expect to write code that keeps a 777 safely in the air. That is the type of scenario that we need discipline, not creativity.
Keeping any aircraft/metro/car safely in the air/on the rails/road does require a process yes (specification in Z etc), but it needs to be balanced with a certain degree of interest in your subjects that only comes from enthusiasm. In the real world no specification is 100% complete and there are often times when a coder has to make a judgement call and send a memo asking for clarification saying "This was unclear I did this, confirm it is correct" (blocking until you get an answer isn't usually an option owing to deadlines). Quite often these aren't answered and it's only the programmers own interest in what they're writing and passion that ensures the correct decision is made. Keeping that passion and enthusiasm is nigh on impossible if EVERYTHING is process.
What it will take for true competitiveness happen here is a regulatory order to have the cable and DSL companies split their content purchasing sides off from their "pipes" business. Whilst they still have vertical integration there is going to be no further incentive for them to compete on usage limits and speeds. What they have today is "fast enough" for web access, email, etc. Their own digital content whilst travelling across the same physical infrastructure does not count toward usage limits.
The problem is that market forces do not work towards efficiency in situations of "natural monopoly". I don't blame Comcast, or AT&T for how they behave, it's only natural and in the interests of their shareholders, however economically they are benefiting from an externality and this must be gradually dealt with.
Sounds like symmetric key encryption with HMAC (hash message authentication code) to me. The problem is generating that HMAC at Alice's end, customers want to be able to pay online anywhere. There have been proposals to build a pad into the card, but this isn't going anywhere fast at the moment (costs and the fact that your average credit card lives in the school of hard knocks, keypads are a bit too fragile).
Should have hashed the passwords certainly but a hashed CC# is useless for billing. Better to keep it on an isolated payment processing server. I'm wondering if they're going to get screwed on PCI-DSS for this particular debacle.
If this is true then in the United Kingdom at least this is a criminal offence. It's a violation of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and possibly the Computer Misuse Act. The fact that it's hidden deep in some EULA wouldn't fly, unless they made a deliberate effort to ensure users were aware.
Also, I am super curious why there is no special mention of whoever he pulled (apparently 1/3rd of the study participants) from the Nuclear Medicine School.
In a study focussed on radiation adsorption, I would think the people who spend a considerable amount of time near a mix of X-Rays and MRI machines might be worth considering as a substantially unique group.
I've read through the thing (institutional login is a lovely thing) and have to agree. Sure they report some statistically significant values but the paper's short on information about the case and control group and probably underpowered to boot. There's also no mention of controlling for smoking or other environmental factors. Because the participants were recruited via word of mouth it could be that his case group has to wear their phones for a specific job and the controls do not. Either way it's irresponsible journalism to report on a study which is merely a pilot and lacks the statistical rigour to have anything worthwhile to report. I'm also skeptical about the use of the paired t-test, how were the participants matched?
As for some fmri or similar being able to identify gayness I'm skeptical.
What I read about was actually anatomical. IIRC, some tiny component of the brain was either larger or smaller.
You actually got me curious about this so I looked up the paper. I assume you're talking about pubmed article:17975723. Unfortunately that study has a sample size of 22, 12 cases and 10 controls so I'm calling underpowered study on that one. Actually the authors called it "The participants in the present study were stringently selected and the groups were carefully matched, but the results are limited due to low power", they also said "It is noted that because our ratio of number of observations to predictors was low, there is increased likelihood of chance findings with this analysis". I also don't see any citations indicating there was a successful larger sample. What you see there is a pilot study, but no followup so I really would be cautious about drawing conclusions from it.
The brain cells of every human is pretty much identical, how they're wired is what differs. As for some fmri or similar being able to identify gayness I'm skeptical. We're only just becoming able to reliably identify major neural disorders such as autism. You might be able to pick up arousal but that's more environmental than preprogrammed (think of fetishes people have or the Victorian sexualisation of ankles). Being able to predict what makes someone fall in love? That's hard
Seriously, stop comparing the number of deaths caused. Every single death is one too many.
You sound like the tobacco industry claiming there is no link between smoking and cancer.
Stop ignoring the dangers in case large amounts of radioactive particles leak and spread. One time is too many.
Every single death is one too many? Whilst that's a nice ideal, it's entirely impractical because life is inherently risky. You also make it sound like contamination is solely a nuclear issue. Couple of events for you to ponder:
Deepwater Horizon - the explosion alone killed 11 workers, to say nothing of the coast.
By your logic we should also ban coal mining and oil drilling, a hell of a lot people die from accidents whilst extracting these and they contaminate the landscape with carcinogens galore. Frankly we have to manage the risk, because nobody wants to give up their car or central heating quite yet.
The biggest issue was not the major bankers, they were idiots and Leyman Brothers was allowed to fail, merrill lynch got taken over for way less than it was valued last years. The shareholders lost out yes, but frankly that's what happens with equity, you take a risk. Interestingly enough the major banks have now just about repaid the money they borrowed with interest, the federal government even made a $20 Billon profit on that.
The thing you should be upset about was the fact that the Feds were set up (by themselves) in the shape of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to be exposed to a level of risk which was foolish. This is where you guys will lose the majority of your TARP money not the actual banks.
So... Sony are now the evil and greedy because the Linux they put on the PS3 was locked down and heavily sand boxed?.
Actually I didn't say Sony was evil and greedy, you did. For Sony to be evil and greedy they would actually have to be a person rather than a legal personality. Corporations aren't greedy but they do seek to maximise profits, it's in the nature of the beast so to speak. One should hardly be surprised by that, and calling it evil is somewhat naive. If you don't want to a corporation to do something, ensure it isn't profitable for them to do and they usually won't.
My point which I think you missed was this, when dealing with large companies, don't look for good motivations. These don't usually raise share prices so look for the commercial reasons why they're doing it. Sony doesn't hate Linux or anything like that. However, in this case the GGP poster somewhat naively thinks that Sony is going to all this trouble because of a great crusade against cheaters. If cheating gets to excessive levels would hit revenues, then yes they will certainly act but to spend a huge amount of a pre-emptive strike like this? No it's too expensive for it to be that, so look for the other reasons and bingo licensing rights raises it's head. Actually if you remember Atari Vs Nintendo you can see why they want to stop this. They really don't want a Tengen situation whether someone tries to make unlicensed games commercially.
For Sony it's not really about cheating, it's about getting their royalty every time a game is sold. It's the same reason why "Other OS" wasn't allowed full access to the processing power of the PS3. If writing games in Linux had become a viable option on the PS3 then at least some companies would have considered distributing some of their content that way, saving themselves a huge margin. Incidentally cheating will always be an issue if your game's server trusts the client excessively anyway.
As with most major issues there's bound to be a big ol' postmortem on this. As head of Dev you've probably got a unique insight into this, I'm curious as to your perspective on this, what you think the cause of failure might be? More strategic or more technical? Poor interface specification? Inability to handle queries under full load? From TFA there was supposedly 15 months of testing. So I'm curious as to why it failed, whether the testing simply wasn't realistic and/or thorough enough, or it was something that just wouldn't come up except on the live system?
They got cut off, then they got systematically removed from mailing lists?
I don't think it's a conspiracy. They've probably just been automatically removed by the mailing list's bounce handler. They were down for long enough for most SMTP servers to give up and do a return to sender which causes most mailer software to remove you.
This is not true at all. The increase of $1 per hour for laborers on tomatoes increased their price by cents per pound. Labor is not the biggest cost of these goods.
Cents per pound matter in farming because the market doesn't care if you're legal or not. If you're employing all legal workers and your neighbours are employing illegals you're still going to have to absorb the difference. It all adds up and it can be the difference between a profit and a loss.
The real reason isn't just about voting blocs, it's about party donors and cheap labor and both parties are guilty of it. Why do you think no serious attempt has been made to punish firms for deliberately employing illegal immigrants.
Americans want cheap goods made in the USA -> largest cost in goods manufacture is labor + Illegals are cheap = Political inaction
As for the problems we face today, most would disappear if we followed the 9th and 10th Amendments instead of ignoring them. No more bailouts of AIG, or forced purchasing of hospital insurance I don't want, or war on (some) drugs, or giving "stimulus money" to General Motors, and so on. Congress is forbidden, by the tenth, to do those things.
Wishful thinking I suspect, whilst Congress might be forbidden but if they couldn't do it that way, it would be done via the States instead. Money always finds a way, it'd take longer but it would happen. Such is the system we live in.
As for the bailouts being restricted by the 10th a company who's collapse would affect practically every state would probably come under the interstate commerce clause. They should have made sure they had more chance of making a profit from what is effectively an investment though.
The big drawback is that once they're lit you have no control, you can't turn them off, or even throttle them down.
Something I've always wondered, if one of the shuttle's SRBs fails to lit and the other one starts up, what happens?
Even though you can't turn off the booster you can detach it and use the range safety device to self destruct it. Have a look at "Space Shuttle Abort Modes" on Wikipedia.
You don't need to remove the TTL, just reset it every fifty years or so.
A drug that restores the telomeres in each cell could be applied when needed, and then the telomeres would be shortened again at each cell division in the normal way.
There exists such a chemical, it's an enzyme it's called telomerase and it is actually active in a significant proportion of cells in the body. Either way the situation is far more nucanced than just the telomeres.
Whilst in the British system the Prime Minister would give the order for a strike he is not in law the commander in chief of our armed forces the Queen is. In normal day-to-day military operations, this is ignored as the PM's commands are deemed as coming from her. If however the Chief of Defence Staff responsible for passing the order to the troups thought the prime minster issuing the order was "stark raving mad", he would be within his rights to refuse it as contrary to the Queen's wishes. Essentially the PM has positive power of authorisation and the CDS has negative power to veto.
The Intel Key probably wasn't leaked, most folks have concluded it was in fact mathematically derived from a load of player keys that had been ripped from their devices (or software).
They weren't CA keys, they were the private keys belonging to certificates used by two hardware companies to sign their code. If they were CA keys then every single certificate signed by those CA keys owned by literally thousands of companies would have to be revoked and reissued. As it was the CA's just added the two keys fingerprints to the CRL, thus invalidating the certificates owned by those two companies and any drivers signed by them.
People tend to misunderstand this, they mistake the founding fathers ideal of political independance from church for complete divorce of faith and policy. The USA was founded on the words:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The reference to a creator shouldn't really surprise us when we think about the time when this was written. The founding fathers believed that faith should have a place in influencing political decisions but they also believed that organised religion had NO place in government. Religion in Europe was so intertwined in politics it was unreal, if you read about the Pope's, Anti-Popes and the constant switching of religions in England every time the king changed, you can understand why they wanted to keep the stinkin' priests out of government. Unfortunately with the Reverends and ministers elbowing their way into congress even these original ideals are under threat. It's not their faith that's the threat, it's the fact that we put them into government itself.
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On the other hand, what with FaceTime being a new thing entirely (instead of taking one of the existing open ones, such as Google's video chat XMPP extensions), and locked down tight so far despite all the promises, I have a bad feeling about this...
Indeed they still haven't delivered on the "open standards" bit of Facetime by documenting what is in it, this is annoying but what is in Facetime is by no means a "new thing entirely". What a wee bit of packet sniffing has revealed is interesting, only the directory service is proprietary, the rest is a combination of SIP, STUN, MPEG4 AVC and several other firewall passing methods that are pretty well documented. I suspect what has happened is that it's all been ready to release, and then either someone has realised that the directory service can be spoofed or some silly person in sales thinks they can improve iThing sales by keeping it locked up.
But don't expect to write code that keeps a 777 safely in the air. That is the type of scenario that we need discipline, not creativity.
Keeping any aircraft/metro/car safely in the air/on the rails/road does require a process yes (specification in Z etc), but it needs to be balanced with a certain degree of interest in your subjects that only comes from enthusiasm. In the real world no specification is 100% complete and there are often times when a coder has to make a judgement call and send a memo asking for clarification saying "This was unclear I did this, confirm it is correct" (blocking until you get an answer isn't usually an option owing to deadlines). Quite often these aren't answered and it's only the programmers own interest in what they're writing and passion that ensures the correct decision is made. Keeping that passion and enthusiasm is nigh on impossible if EVERYTHING is process.
What it will take for true competitiveness happen here is a regulatory order to have the cable and DSL companies split their content purchasing sides off from their "pipes" business. Whilst they still have vertical integration there is going to be no further incentive for them to compete on usage limits and speeds. What they have today is "fast enough" for web access, email, etc. Their own digital content whilst travelling across the same physical infrastructure does not count toward usage limits.
The problem is that market forces do not work towards efficiency in situations of "natural monopoly". I don't blame Comcast, or AT&T for how they behave, it's only natural and in the interests of their shareholders, however economically they are benefiting from an externality and this must be gradually dealt with.
Google powers its servers off 12V DC with inbuilt batteries on each server. The savings in power costs make this worth it. http://insidehpc.com/2009/04/02/google-unveils-its-super-secret-server-design-dc-and-batteries-built-in/
Sounds like symmetric key encryption with HMAC (hash message authentication code) to me. The problem is generating that HMAC at Alice's end, customers want to be able to pay online anywhere. There have been proposals to build a pad into the card, but this isn't going anywhere fast at the moment (costs and the fact that your average credit card lives in the school of hard knocks, keypads are a bit too fragile).
Should have hashed the passwords certainly but a hashed CC# is useless for billing. Better to keep it on an isolated payment processing server. I'm wondering if they're going to get screwed on PCI-DSS for this particular debacle.
If this is true then in the United Kingdom at least this is a criminal offence. It's a violation of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and possibly the Computer Misuse Act. The fact that it's hidden deep in some EULA wouldn't fly, unless they made a deliberate effort to ensure users were aware.
Also, I am super curious why there is no special mention of whoever he pulled (apparently 1/3rd of the study participants) from the Nuclear Medicine School.
In a study focussed on radiation adsorption, I would think the people who spend a considerable amount of time near a mix of X-Rays and MRI machines might be worth considering as a substantially unique group.
I've read through the thing (institutional login is a lovely thing) and have to agree. Sure they report some statistically significant values but the paper's short on information about the case and control group and probably underpowered to boot. There's also no mention of controlling for smoking or other environmental factors. Because the participants were recruited via word of mouth it could be that his case group has to wear their phones for a specific job and the controls do not. Either way it's irresponsible journalism to report on a study which is merely a pilot and lacks the statistical rigour to have anything worthwhile to report. I'm also skeptical about the use of the paired t-test, how were the participants matched?
As for some fmri or similar being able to identify gayness I'm skeptical.
What I read about was actually anatomical. IIRC, some tiny component of the brain was either larger or smaller.
You actually got me curious about this so I looked up the paper. I assume you're talking about pubmed article:17975723. Unfortunately that study has a sample size of 22, 12 cases and 10 controls so I'm calling underpowered study on that one. Actually the authors called it "The participants in the present study were stringently selected and the groups were carefully matched, but the results are limited due to low power", they also said "It is noted that because our ratio of number of observations to predictors was low, there is increased likelihood of chance findings with this analysis". I also don't see any citations indicating there was a successful larger sample. What you see there is a pilot study, but no followup so I really would be cautious about drawing conclusions from it.
The brain cells of every human is pretty much identical, how they're wired is what differs. As for some fmri or similar being able to identify gayness I'm skeptical. We're only just becoming able to reliably identify major neural disorders such as autism. You might be able to pick up arousal but that's more environmental than preprogrammed (think of fetishes people have or the Victorian sexualisation of ankles). Being able to predict what makes someone fall in love? That's hard
Seriously, stop comparing the number of deaths caused. Every single death is one too many. You sound like the tobacco industry claiming there is no link between smoking and cancer. Stop ignoring the dangers in case large amounts of radioactive particles leak and spread. One time is too many.
Every single death is one too many? Whilst that's a nice ideal, it's entirely impractical because life is inherently risky. You also make it sound like contamination is solely a nuclear issue. Couple of events for you to ponder:
By your logic we should also ban coal mining and oil drilling, a hell of a lot people die from accidents whilst extracting these and they contaminate the landscape with carcinogens galore. Frankly we have to manage the risk, because nobody wants to give up their car or central heating quite yet.
The biggest issue was not the major bankers, they were idiots and Leyman Brothers was allowed to fail, merrill lynch got taken over for way less than it was valued last years. The shareholders lost out yes, but frankly that's what happens with equity, you take a risk. Interestingly enough the major banks have now just about repaid the money they borrowed with interest, the federal government even made a $20 Billon profit on that.
The thing you should be upset about was the fact that the Feds were set up (by themselves) in the shape of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae to be exposed to a level of risk which was foolish. This is where you guys will lose the majority of your TARP money not the actual banks.
So... Sony are now the evil and greedy because the Linux they put on the PS3 was locked down and heavily sand boxed?.
Actually I didn't say Sony was evil and greedy, you did. For Sony to be evil and greedy they would actually have to be a person rather than a legal personality. Corporations aren't greedy but they do seek to maximise profits, it's in the nature of the beast so to speak. One should hardly be surprised by that, and calling it evil is somewhat naive. If you don't want to a corporation to do something, ensure it isn't profitable for them to do and they usually won't.
My point which I think you missed was this, when dealing with large companies, don't look for good motivations. These don't usually raise share prices so look for the commercial reasons why they're doing it. Sony doesn't hate Linux or anything like that. However, in this case the GGP poster somewhat naively thinks that Sony is going to all this trouble because of a great crusade against cheaters. If cheating gets to excessive levels would hit revenues, then yes they will certainly act but to spend a huge amount of a pre-emptive strike like this? No it's too expensive for it to be that, so look for the other reasons and bingo licensing rights raises it's head. Actually if you remember Atari Vs Nintendo you can see why they want to stop this. They really don't want a Tengen situation whether someone tries to make unlicensed games commercially.
For Sony it's not really about cheating, it's about getting their royalty every time a game is sold. It's the same reason why "Other OS" wasn't allowed full access to the processing power of the PS3. If writing games in Linux had become a viable option on the PS3 then at least some companies would have considered distributing some of their content that way, saving themselves a huge margin. Incidentally cheating will always be an issue if your game's server trusts the client excessively anyway.
As with most major issues there's bound to be a big ol' postmortem on this. As head of Dev you've probably got a unique insight into this, I'm curious as to your perspective on this, what you think the cause of failure might be? More strategic or more technical? Poor interface specification? Inability to handle queries under full load? From TFA there was supposedly 15 months of testing. So I'm curious as to why it failed, whether the testing simply wasn't realistic and/or thorough enough, or it was something that just wouldn't come up except on the live system?
They got cut off, then they got systematically removed from mailing lists?
I don't think it's a conspiracy. They've probably just been automatically removed by the mailing list's bounce handler. They were down for long enough for most SMTP servers to give up and do a return to sender which causes most mailer software to remove you.
This is not true at all. The increase of $1 per hour for laborers on tomatoes increased their price by cents per pound. Labor is not the biggest cost of these goods.
Cents per pound matter in farming because the market doesn't care if you're legal or not. If you're employing all legal workers and your neighbours are employing illegals you're still going to have to absorb the difference. It all adds up and it can be the difference between a profit and a loss.
The real reason isn't just about voting blocs, it's about party donors and cheap labor and both parties are guilty of it. Why do you think no serious attempt has been made to punish firms for deliberately employing illegal immigrants. Americans want cheap goods made in the USA -> largest cost in goods manufacture is labor + Illegals are cheap = Political inaction
As for the problems we face today, most would disappear if we followed the 9th and 10th Amendments instead of ignoring them. No more bailouts of AIG, or forced purchasing of hospital insurance I don't want, or war on (some) drugs, or giving "stimulus money" to General Motors, and so on. Congress is forbidden, by the tenth, to do those things.
Wishful thinking I suspect, whilst Congress might be forbidden but if they couldn't do it that way, it would be done via the States instead. Money always finds a way, it'd take longer but it would happen. Such is the system we live in.
As for the bailouts being restricted by the 10th a company who's collapse would affect practically every state would probably come under the interstate commerce clause. They should have made sure they had more chance of making a profit from what is effectively an investment though.
The big drawback is that once they're lit you have no control, you can't turn them off, or even throttle them down.
Something I've always wondered, if one of the shuttle's SRBs fails to lit and the other one starts up, what happens?
Even though you can't turn off the booster you can detach it and use the range safety device to self destruct it. Have a look at "Space Shuttle Abort Modes" on Wikipedia.
You don't need to remove the TTL, just reset it every fifty years or so.
A drug that restores the telomeres in each cell could be applied when needed, and then the telomeres would be shortened again at each cell division in the normal way.
There exists such a chemical, it's an enzyme it's called telomerase and it is actually active in a significant proportion of cells in the body. Either way the situation is far more nucanced than just the telomeres.
Whilst in the British system the Prime Minister would give the order for a strike he is not in law the commander in chief of our armed forces the Queen is. In normal day-to-day military operations, this is ignored as the PM's commands are deemed as coming from her. If however the Chief of Defence Staff responsible for passing the order to the troups thought the prime minster issuing the order was "stark raving mad", he would be within his rights to refuse it as contrary to the Queen's wishes. Essentially the PM has positive power of authorisation and the CDS has negative power to veto.
The Intel Key probably wasn't leaked, most folks have concluded it was in fact mathematically derived from a load of player keys that had been ripped from their devices (or software).
They weren't CA keys, they were the private keys belonging to certificates used by two hardware companies to sign their code. If they were CA keys then every single certificate signed by those CA keys owned by literally thousands of companies would have to be revoked and reissued. As it was the CA's just added the two keys fingerprints to the CRL, thus invalidating the certificates owned by those two companies and any drivers signed by them.
People tend to misunderstand this, they mistake the founding fathers ideal of political independance from church for complete divorce of faith and policy. The USA was founded on the words:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The reference to a creator shouldn't really surprise us when we think about the time when this was written. The founding fathers believed that faith should have a place in influencing political decisions but they also believed that organised religion had NO place in government. Religion in Europe was so intertwined in politics it was unreal, if you read about the Pope's, Anti-Popes and the constant switching of religions in England every time the king changed, you can understand why they wanted to keep the stinkin' priests out of government. Unfortunately with the Reverends and ministers elbowing their way into congress even these original ideals are under threat. It's not their faith that's the threat, it's the fact that we put them into government itself.