from the provided article, I spotted one very interesting comment:
Conclusion: Either he is guilty and gets 15 years or he is innocent and gets 25 years.
For that reason I think the whole idea of "making deals" should be tossed out. Criminals should not be allowed to trade aspects of their crime to reduce their sentence. All that seems to do is encourage them to plan their crime more carefully so they have more "bargaining power" if caught. If he did it, and hadn't hid the body as well, and they found it, he wouldn't be offered this option to reduce his sentence.
Although someone else said that recently no governor has granted parole for anyone convicted of 1st or 2nd degree murder, so it may not matter either way. The "to life" probably will be applied.
I thought the way to improve a country's economy was to encourage other countries to buy products made here? And to discourage our own countrymen from buying abroad? (all that "buy Made In The USA" noise we hear)
What part of this (what Nintendo is doing) is bad?
why don't people "get it"? if you attach a generator of any kind to anything it will cause drag on whatever it's attached to, which is why it's able to produce energy.
If you attach a generator to your shoes, you will get power, and will get more tiring walk.
As far as walking goes, it's a pendulum-like motion that's highly efficient, and if you try to tap into that you're not going to like how tiring that walk to the grocery store gets.
It wouldn't even have to be anything major or permanent. Imagine having to shave before you could use your computer, because it doesn't like your 4-o'clock shadow?
I wonder how big the percentage is of people that use their computer in the morning before they shave?
Or even for the ladies, that magical facial/hair transformation they call 'getting ready for work'.
That's be pretty annoying on a Saturday having to get up and get the shower and makeup on etc before your computer would let you login.
That's similar to another method I had imagined, but in another direction. I'd like to receive a receipt at the voting machine with a randomly generated number on it which is my passkey. Then at home I can login to the govt website and enter my passkey and confirm that my vote was recorded and counted as I made it.
But both your method and mine have one problem. One reason for the "secret ballot" is to prevent people from forcing or pressuring you to vote in a certain way, or to sell your vote. The only way to prevent these things from happening is to make it impossible to prove how you voted after the fact. Someone could pay you $10 to vote for their candidate, you could go in and vote for the other guy, and they would have no way to verify you 'earned' your $10. So this prevents anyone from effectively being able to buy votes.
Another example, lets say you work for a small company and the owner holds a private meeting and demands all his employees vote for his man or you're fired. You're expected to bring your receipt on the day after to verify your vote. Again the secret ballot makes this impossible to pull off.
Now of course both of these issues are catchable, but that's not the point. The point of the secret ballot is so that these can't be issues in the first place.
What I'd personally like to know is what accounts for discrepancies in recounts? I mean, if the initial vote tallies to 215 / 210, and we recount and now it's 214/212, and then we recount again and now it's 213/214, (as we saw awhile ago...) why doesn't this cause the whole process to get frozen and some serious digging to get started? If you recount, and the numbers MATCH, ok stick with it. If they don't match, there's no reason to say which one is more correct. Just because one was made more recently does not make it more accurate. Until you have identified the cause that one (or both) counts are mistaken I can't trust the accuracy of your count. The simple fact that every time they recount they can get different answers leaves me at a loss for words.
The key to decrypt the data does not need to be in the virus. And each person's machine could be encrypted with a different randomly generated key, transmitted to the attacker. Even if someone did eventually break the key, it would only help one victim.
Even if the key is static, I'd be counting on the fraudster to be rolling up a new key every two weeks along with the latest bugfixes and enhancements to the worm.
The large botnets are currently using signatures on their C&C traffic to prevent their botnet from being hijacked (or ordered to self-destruct, etc) and they are using high bitcount also. If there ever was a target for cracking, don't you think that would be it, and we'd truly know if mass efforts to defeat a single strong key were practical?
well yes the predators we've known about for some time now, those are unmanned. I'm wondering about manned craft? Can they override the pilot's decision not to deploy?
was he representing himself at the disbarment hearing?
Thompson's disciplinary hearing apparently ended in the attorney walking out of the courtroom after saying the judge did not have the authority to hear his case.
I recall a saying, "A lawyer that represents himself has a fool for a client." Sounds like he was representing himself?
I wonder though if it's possible for some other human to trigger the release? Like if the pilot in the plane looked down and saw the bomb was set to hit a civilian target instead of a military one, and said "no, I'm not doing that, I'm going to turn the plane around now", can someone back at HQ hit their button instead? I'd bet they can.
You should have bought SAM (Software Animated Mouth) for your//c. It was just about on par with the jerky disjointed speech in WarGames. "heh-looow, maaaie nem iz sAam."
This period of exclusivity is to allow them to get the credit for their hard work in choosing the observation, and to prevent being scooped by fellow academics. It's like a very short-lived patent of sorts.
Was just going to say, you mean "like how the patent system is supposed to work?
That'd be nice to have a usable bash shell via web interface, for those times when we have access to a kiosk etc that has a web browser but no terminal/ssh. With the right web page we could ssh into our machine at home.
The Alaska Science Forum did an article on this problem back in 1990. Unfortunately I haven't found the promised followup. This contains a lot more information than the wikipedia articles.
Basically it involves information on why the bananas are hard to breed for a better strain. (they have no seeds) The Honduras Foundation for Agricultural Research has found way of crossbreeding in wild strains to produce seeds. Looks like it's slow going, but genetic mutation is pretty much the only way to engineer in resistance to new disease, and that will require seeds, not cuttings.
I wasn't able to find any updates on the HFAR's progress. Anyone else have any luck?
my first impression would be something battery related. If a short trips something that shuts off your incoming AC, it kicks you over to batteries and generators. If something is then reset and brings you back online a little bit later, your hardware switches back to AC and all the batteries start charging. If the electrical fault wasn't really FIXED, (think sparks spraying from a nearby electrical box) but merely tripped something that you reset, then it can set off a hydrogen explosion from the H and O the batteries are dumping out while being recharged. THAT would require you to take things totally offline to fix since it's the point where your redundant power sources converge.
The support forum posts were not as heavy on detail as I would like to have seen, but better than about any I have ever seen under such circumstances. (something is always better than nothing) Looks like a transformer went out and did some structural damage. Probably not so much of an explosion. If you've ever seen a substation transformer go, that's probably about what happened here.
Their main concern besides getting power restored seems to be to repair networking equipment. Hard to say how that was damaged, it may have power spiked their routers and switches. (could have been other related causes - physical damage or got soaked with transformer coolant when it vented) At any rate, hazmat and firemen in general don't like working on live wires so they basically told them we don't care if you can turn some of it back on, you're going to leave it all off until we're done. Looks like they made good use of that time to gather replacement hardware and build an action plan. At this point it appears that they've been given the OK to get in there and start replacing hardware and fixing power.
There is a good video of a substation problem on youtube. This isn't necessarily what happened here, but you get the idea. Not really an explosion so much as a fire.
Actually ADATA sells the MyFlash 16. It's a "double long" flash drive compared to most, and quality is very poor. (I've owned two, one was defective, and the other was unreliable, but WAS 16gb)
My current drive is a SanDisk FireFly 8, for it's small size (sub-single length) and reliable operation. I would LOVE to replace it with a 16, and I've been waiting what I consider a very long time for this jump to occur. Here's hoping by christmas I can have a FireFly 16. It's my service drive, and I don't "pack light", so right now I'm down to about 300mb free no matter how much fat I try to trim.
Considering the size of the firefly I have to assume it has four 16gbit nands, a stack of two on both sides of the board. If that's the case, the 32gbit nands will get me a 16 soon.
Is this to decide whether early termination fees need to be abolished or highly regulated, or to determine if they're OK as is? (or could it go either way?)
I could see this hearing poised to set a very good, or a very bad, precedence.
One other thing that hit me immediately... MS: "Omigod they found a BUG in our competitor's web browser! Because we're very concerned for our users' security, we urge you to stop using that browser immediately! Users should NEVER use a buggy web browser! (unless it's explorer)"
ok I'm the curious type so I made a test on my server, with the provided example.
Since Safari does not know how to render content-type of blah/blah, it will automatically start downloading carpet_bomb.cgi every time it is served.
Not for me? Safari 3.0.4 running on Mac OS X 10.5.2 renders a web page of numerous blank empty boxes. Nothing was placed in any local folder. Is anyone else able to duplicate this?
That's a good point I hadn't considered - life will tend to terraform an environment. Earth offers a much greater variety of environments than mars, and among them there are very few places where it's hard to identify the presence of life even with only casual observation. If there were life on mars, it would be everywhere since conditions are so similar everywhere and very little additional evolution would be required to colonize.
I think what they're looking for is the past presence of life. Hoping perhaps that mars got life fired up and then just about the time it started, there was too rapid of an environmental change which killed it before it got very evolved. Which is why they are looking for past evidence of liquid water. Water with its neutral ph makes probably the best place for life to initially develop. Maybe it's more correct they are searching for evidence of life on mars, not life itself.
We keep seeing these same generalizations going on when looking for life elsewhere.
Lets face it, odds are if we DO find life, it's going to be fundamentally different than what we're expecting it to be. Saying conditions aren't good for life anywhere based on what we consider habitable is silly. The reason our conditions are ideal for our life isn't because we got lucky and got the right combination of environment to grow up in, it's because we adapted to become the best suited for the environment we developed in.
I'll give them "initial conditions" though. Certain environments certainly lower the odds for genesis. Once you've achieved genesis however, evolution takes over, and so long as you don't have a fast severe change in conditions, life will adapt over time to become well-suited to whatever the environment can throw at it.
So unless you're looking for life that has just recently come to be, there's almost no point in examining conditions. Probably the only environmental necessity is reasonable temperatures. (and I mean very generous range, at least a ways over abs 0 and too low to melt lead)
Actually, on the high end, it would not completely surprise me to find life IN a sun. Whenever we look somewhere and say no life can exist there, it's too hot, too cold, too alkaline, too dry, whatever, we end up finding life. Recently we found life IN a rock, eating radioactivity. After that you pretty much have to be an optimist.
basically using the SSD part of it as a giant buffer? Not a bad idea really. I could use that. I reboot my laptop maybe every three weeks, so a lot of my OS probably doesn't get reaccessed much after a restart. A lot of what's on my HDD is media - movies and other entertainment for when I'm stuck somewhere on the road. Again not stuff I need access to very frequently.
My HD has 186gb usable, and I'm using 172 of it. (eek...) I bet I only access at most 20 gb of that most of the time. Even making a say, 32gb or 64gb buffer would work great for how I use the computer - I'd be running entirely off the SSD part most of the time.
Most users could probably accommodate a dual drive anyway. One partition for the SSD and one for the HDD. Put your media and other things you don't need access to often but want to have on tap on the HDD.
Slashdot Mirror
from the provided article, I spotted one very interesting comment:
Conclusion: Either he is guilty and gets 15 years or he is innocent and gets 25 years.
For that reason I think the whole idea of "making deals" should be tossed out. Criminals should not be allowed to trade aspects of their crime to reduce their sentence. All that seems to do is encourage them to plan their crime more carefully so they have more "bargaining power" if caught. If he did it, and hadn't hid the body as well, and they found it, he wouldn't be offered this option to reduce his sentence.
Although someone else said that recently no governor has granted parole for anyone convicted of 1st or 2nd degree murder, so it may not matter either way. The "to life" probably will be applied.
I thought the way to improve a country's economy was to encourage other countries to buy products made here? And to discourage our own countrymen from buying abroad? (all that "buy Made In The USA" noise we hear)
What part of this (what Nintendo is doing) is bad?
why don't people "get it"? if you attach a generator of any kind to anything it will cause drag on whatever it's attached to, which is why it's able to produce energy.
If you attach a generator to your shoes, you will get power, and will get more tiring walk.
As far as walking goes, it's a pendulum-like motion that's highly efficient, and if you try to tap into that you're not going to like how tiring that walk to the grocery store gets.
It wouldn't even have to be anything major or permanent. Imagine having to shave before you could use your computer, because it doesn't like your 4-o'clock shadow?
I wonder how big the percentage is of people that use their computer in the morning before they shave?
Or even for the ladies, that magical facial/hair transformation they call 'getting ready for work'.
That's be pretty annoying on a Saturday having to get up and get the shower and makeup on etc before your computer would let you login.
That's similar to another method I had imagined, but in another direction. I'd like to receive a receipt at the voting machine with a randomly generated number on it which is my passkey. Then at home I can login to the govt website and enter my passkey and confirm that my vote was recorded and counted as I made it.
But both your method and mine have one problem. One reason for the "secret ballot" is to prevent people from forcing or pressuring you to vote in a certain way, or to sell your vote. The only way to prevent these things from happening is to make it impossible to prove how you voted after the fact. Someone could pay you $10 to vote for their candidate, you could go in and vote for the other guy, and they would have no way to verify you 'earned' your $10. So this prevents anyone from effectively being able to buy votes.
Another example, lets say you work for a small company and the owner holds a private meeting and demands all his employees vote for his man or you're fired. You're expected to bring your receipt on the day after to verify your vote. Again the secret ballot makes this impossible to pull off.
Now of course both of these issues are catchable, but that's not the point. The point of the secret ballot is so that these can't be issues in the first place.
What I'd personally like to know is what accounts for discrepancies in recounts? I mean, if the initial vote tallies to 215 / 210, and we recount and now it's 214/212, and then we recount again and now it's 213/214, (as we saw awhile ago...) why doesn't this cause the whole process to get frozen and some serious digging to get started? If you recount, and the numbers MATCH, ok stick with it. If they don't match, there's no reason to say which one is more correct. Just because one was made more recently does not make it more accurate. Until you have identified the cause that one (or both) counts are mistaken I can't trust the accuracy of your count. The simple fact that every time they recount they can get different answers leaves me at a loss for words.
The key to decrypt the data does not need to be in the virus. And each person's machine could be encrypted with a different randomly generated key, transmitted to the attacker. Even if someone did eventually break the key, it would only help one victim.
Even if the key is static, I'd be counting on the fraudster to be rolling up a new key every two weeks along with the latest bugfixes and enhancements to the worm.
The large botnets are currently using signatures on their C&C traffic to prevent their botnet from being hijacked (or ordered to self-destruct, etc) and they are using high bitcount also. If there ever was a target for cracking, don't you think that would be it, and we'd truly know if mass efforts to defeat a single strong key were practical?
well yes the predators we've known about for some time now, those are unmanned. I'm wondering about manned craft? Can they override the pilot's decision not to deploy?
I wonder how much of this is an actual increase in the problem, or an increase in the reporting of the problem?
was he representing himself at the disbarment hearing?
Thompson's disciplinary hearing apparently ended in the attorney walking out of the courtroom after saying the judge did not have the authority to hear his case.
I recall a saying, "A lawyer that represents himself has a fool for a client." Sounds like he was representing himself?
The only way to win is to not play the game.
Probably more correct to say instead,
The only way to not lose is to not play the game.
I wonder though if it's possible for some other human to trigger the release? Like if the pilot in the plane looked down and saw the bomb was set to hit a civilian target instead of a military one, and said "no, I'm not doing that, I'm going to turn the plane around now", can someone back at HQ hit their button instead? I'd bet they can.
You should have bought SAM (Software Animated Mouth) for your //c. It was just about on par with the jerky disjointed speech in WarGames. "heh-looow, maaaie nem iz sAam."
Those sites are just chock full of advertisements for Norton and download links to NOD32...
This period of exclusivity is to allow them to get the credit for their hard work in choosing the observation, and to prevent being scooped by fellow academics. It's like a very short-lived patent of sorts.
Was just going to say, you mean "like how the patent system is supposed to work?
That'd be nice to have a usable bash shell via web interface, for those times when we have access to a kiosk etc that has a web browser but no terminal/ssh. With the right web page we could ssh into our machine at home.
The Alaska Science Forum did an article on this problem back in 1990. Unfortunately I haven't found the promised followup. This contains a lot more information than the wikipedia articles.
Basically it involves information on why the bananas are hard to breed for a better strain. (they have no seeds) The Honduras Foundation for Agricultural Research has found way of crossbreeding in wild strains to produce seeds. Looks like it's slow going, but genetic mutation is pretty much the only way to engineer in resistance to new disease, and that will require seeds, not cuttings.
I wasn't able to find any updates on the HFAR's progress. Anyone else have any luck?
my first impression would be something battery related. If a short trips something that shuts off your incoming AC, it kicks you over to batteries and generators. If something is then reset and brings you back online a little bit later, your hardware switches back to AC and all the batteries start charging. If the electrical fault wasn't really FIXED, (think sparks spraying from a nearby electrical box) but merely tripped something that you reset, then it can set off a hydrogen explosion from the H and O the batteries are dumping out while being recharged. THAT would require you to take things totally offline to fix since it's the point where your redundant power sources converge.
The support forum posts were not as heavy on detail as I would like to have seen, but better than about any I have ever seen under such circumstances. (something is always better than nothing) Looks like a transformer went out and did some structural damage. Probably not so much of an explosion. If you've ever seen a substation transformer go, that's probably about what happened here.
Their main concern besides getting power restored seems to be to repair networking equipment. Hard to say how that was damaged, it may have power spiked their routers and switches. (could have been other related causes - physical damage or got soaked with transformer coolant when it vented) At any rate, hazmat and firemen in general don't like working on live wires so they basically told them we don't care if you can turn some of it back on, you're going to leave it all off until we're done. Looks like they made good use of that time to gather replacement hardware and build an action plan. At this point it appears that they've been given the OK to get in there and start replacing hardware and fixing power.
There is a good video of a substation problem on youtube. This isn't necessarily what happened here, but you get the idea. Not really an explosion so much as a fire.
16GB thumb drives don't exist
Actually ADATA sells the MyFlash 16. It's a "double long" flash drive compared to most, and quality is very poor. (I've owned two, one was defective, and the other was unreliable, but WAS 16gb)
My current drive is a SanDisk FireFly 8, for it's small size (sub-single length) and reliable operation. I would LOVE to replace it with a 16, and I've been waiting what I consider a very long time for this jump to occur. Here's hoping by christmas I can have a FireFly 16. It's my service drive, and I don't "pack light", so right now I'm down to about 300mb free no matter how much fat I try to trim.
Considering the size of the firefly I have to assume it has four 16gbit nands, a stack of two on both sides of the board. If that's the case, the 32gbit nands will get me a 16 soon.
maybe if you slightly adjusted the spelling it could help
one meelyun dollors!
Is this to decide whether early termination fees need to be abolished or highly regulated, or to determine if they're OK as is? (or could it go either way?)
I could see this hearing poised to set a very good, or a very bad, precedence.
One other thing that hit me immediately... MS: "Omigod they found a BUG in our competitor's web browser! Because we're very concerned for our users' security, we urge you to stop using that browser immediately! Users should NEVER use a buggy web browser! (unless it's explorer)"
ok I'm the curious type so I made a test on my server, with the provided example.
Since Safari does not know how to render content-type of blah/blah, it will automatically start downloading carpet_bomb.cgi every time it is served.
Not for me? Safari 3.0.4 running on Mac OS X 10.5.2 renders a web page of numerous blank empty boxes. Nothing was placed in any local folder. Is anyone else able to duplicate this?
That's a good point I hadn't considered - life will tend to terraform an environment. Earth offers a much greater variety of environments than mars, and among them there are very few places where it's hard to identify the presence of life even with only casual observation. If there were life on mars, it would be everywhere since conditions are so similar everywhere and very little additional evolution would be required to colonize.
I think what they're looking for is the past presence of life. Hoping perhaps that mars got life fired up and then just about the time it started, there was too rapid of an environmental change which killed it before it got very evolved. Which is why they are looking for past evidence of liquid water. Water with its neutral ph makes probably the best place for life to initially develop. Maybe it's more correct they are searching for evidence of life on mars, not life itself.
We keep seeing these same generalizations going on when looking for life elsewhere.
Lets face it, odds are if we DO find life, it's going to be fundamentally different than what we're expecting it to be. Saying conditions aren't good for life anywhere based on what we consider habitable is silly. The reason our conditions are ideal for our life isn't because we got lucky and got the right combination of environment to grow up in, it's because we adapted to become the best suited for the environment we developed in.
I'll give them "initial conditions" though. Certain environments certainly lower the odds for genesis. Once you've achieved genesis however, evolution takes over, and so long as you don't have a fast severe change in conditions, life will adapt over time to become well-suited to whatever the environment can throw at it.
So unless you're looking for life that has just recently come to be, there's almost no point in examining conditions. Probably the only environmental necessity is reasonable temperatures. (and I mean very generous range, at least a ways over abs 0 and too low to melt lead)
Actually, on the high end, it would not completely surprise me to find life IN a sun. Whenever we look somewhere and say no life can exist there, it's too hot, too cold, too alkaline, too dry, whatever, we end up finding life. Recently we found life IN a rock, eating radioactivity. After that you pretty much have to be an optimist.
basically using the SSD part of it as a giant buffer? Not a bad idea really. I could use that. I reboot my laptop maybe every three weeks, so a lot of my OS probably doesn't get reaccessed much after a restart. A lot of what's on my HDD is media - movies and other entertainment for when I'm stuck somewhere on the road. Again not stuff I need access to very frequently.
My HD has 186gb usable, and I'm using 172 of it. (eek...) I bet I only access at most 20 gb of that most of the time. Even making a say, 32gb or 64gb buffer would work great for how I use the computer - I'd be running entirely off the SSD part most of the time.
Most users could probably accommodate a dual drive anyway. One partition for the SSD and one for the HDD. Put your media and other things you don't need access to often but want to have on tap on the HDD.