I too would find these types of articles interesting. It would contribute to making Slashdot a primary news source instead of a regurgitator/aggregator.
Over the years, Slashdot has changed it's style sheets to introduce lots and lots of whitespace.
The site *used* to present a lot more information in a lot less space, and the signal-to-noise ration was much higher. You could see many more articles on the front page, see many more comments on one page and so on.
Every time the style changed, people complained.
We're now at the point where the information is watered down so much that about half the front page is vertical whitespace.
Get rid of some of it! Make the front page more information dense, so we can quickly see if there is something there of interest without having to mouse around the page.
During the 2nd war in Iraq, one of the most interesting accounts was a lone blogger in Baghdad who made nightly posts about what was going on and his views on the situation. He wasn't a journalist or anything, just a guy in an apartment watching missiles destroy buildings in his city. Sadly, he wasn't allowed to continue his reporting after the fall of the regime.
Since we're nerds, it should be possible to get interesting views from conflict areas around the globe in an anonymous manner. Perhaps partner with WikiLeaks to get anonymous interviews and points of view from these areas.
They say that the first casualty of war is the truth, but we're now living in an age where the average reader can dig down to find original sources for some of the media bias and spin.
I would love to read the (anonymous) views of a Chinese engineer, or Indian customer support person, or a Cuban hacker, or Ukranian spammer.
I would find it much more interesting than a talking-head video of some software package founder.
If you're interested in being a primary news source, having the occasional "scoop" where the MSM refers to Slashdot as the breaking story, and have the courage for a high-level of journalistic integrity, then you could do this. Let WikiLeaks handle the anonymity and authentication, you just post the interviews.
It's not for the faint of heart, but it's something you could do.
I understand the need to make revenue, but advertizing portals also serve malware and misleading scams, and use up a ton of bandwidth.
You could lead the way to a workable advertizing policy by allowing ads which are "image and link only".
Only allow advertising which is a clickable image link. Make it their job to count click-through, and don't bother with counting impressions. Or if you do, supply them with the impression count instead of letting them do it through javascript.
Only allow advertising images hosted from your own servers, make a "no flashing, blinking, annoying" policy and stick to it. Set up a directory of images and choose one at every page view.
A lot of advertisers will balk at doing this, but if you hold firm and initially seed your stash with free advertizing to a few open source projects (such as SourceForge or Mozilla or Apache), advertisers will begin to see the light and want in.
(I would totally accept ads under those conditions!)
======
Slashdot should be a high-class establishment. Try to vet your ads with an eye towards clarity and simplicity, with a theme that doesn't insult the intelligence of the reader.
For low class examples, do a google image search on "go daddy ad". Seeing a beautiful woman in underwear is appealing, but it makes the site look like trash.
For high class examples, look at some of the ads in Scientific American (googling doesn't work for this) or the New Yorker.
Again, you may have to dig your heels in and "lead the way" before advertisers begin to see the light.
But if you can make it work, the rest of the internet might follow suit...
======
About 2 weeks before the November elections things go to crap on this site. If it's a presidential election, it goes to crap about 6 weeks beforehand, and reaches insanely fevered pitch starting 2 weeks before.
It will *definitely* happen this year, due to the non-typical candidate choices.
Tamp down new accounts registered during these times, so that a hundred paid "candidate XXX" supporters and congressional aides don't waste all of our time.
Maybe if accounts formed during that time only posted at level 0 until after the election, or maybe turn off new accounts (with an informative message) for a couple of weeks, or maybe allow accounts but defer activating them until after the election.
Note that I am referring to NEW accounts, and only those NEW accounts which are registered during the runup weeks! Regular accounts and long-term readers should be unaffected.
======
On the subject of high class, it would be nice if you limited yourself to ONE April fool's prank on April 1st.
And if you do even that one, note that an "this is obviously absurd" article is NOT an April Fool's prank. A good prank actually fools people, and the best ones fool people for more than a minute. It should be completely believable, and preferably engage the reader emotionally. Like the Piltdown man.
That's a well-formed and unassailable argument, I won't be using that study as a reference in the future. If Slashdot had the "delete post" option I would use it.
Your post does not address the core argument (guns good/guns bad), but that's OK.
Let's pick this up again in the next gun control article discussion.
Firstly, you are citing news articles and not published research, and others might point out the gap in credibility between our arguments. For my part, I know that your sources reflect publish papers so it's all good.
The difference between our arguments is this: I claim that looking at *gun* deaths is misleading, because the vast majority of gun incidents resolve in favor of the gun owner and do not lead to death.
The statistic of measure should be the overall fatality rate (death from all causes), not the "death by gun" rate.
So for a counter example, note that the rate of "death by anaphalactic shock" shoots way up in areas that have lots of vaccinations.
Should we thus avoid vaccinations?
All of your sources are referring to gun deaths. We could ban guns in an attempt to reduce these specific types of death, but if it is at the expense of the overall fatality rate, it's not the prudent move.
Please at least make some make better argument for gun ownership
I don't know what would make a better argument than citing research published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, by, you know, a constitutional lawyer and a PhD in criminology.
But I'm not averse to learning.
What would you recommend as a better argument? How would you go about it?
Guns don't kill, unregulated easy access to firearms does.
Um... actually...
Firstly, private gun sales are legal. Facebook is making a blanket policy which is politically charged, which could also be applied to arranging abortions, distasteful speech, consensual sex of any non-mainstream type, and a host of others that anyone can come up with after a few minutes thought.
So in effect, they are suppressing behaviour that is completely legal.
Secondly, although guns do seem to kill a lot of people, the overall statistic of importance to check is "average expected lifespan", which is much *higher* in areas where there is easy legal access to guns.
To put this another way, if you let your kids play in the yard of a gun owner, their chance of being killed by that gun go way up, but their chances of death by *all causes* go down. If you can't maintain proper nutrition or medicine for a time because you got robbed, it affects your overall lifespan. If your neighbor has guns, it has a protective effect on you because criminals tend to go elsewhere, and so on.
Thirdly, if you like to compare England to the US, consider this Harvard study which finds (journal page 656):
[...] despite constant and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United States saw progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence in the 1990s.On the other hand, the same time period in the United Kingdom saw a constant and dramatic increase in violent crime to which England’s response was evermore drastic gun control including, eventually, banning and confiscating all handguns and many types of long guns. Nevertheless, criminal violence rampantly increased so that by 2000 England surpassed the United States to become one of the developed world’s most violenceridden nations..
To conserve the resources of the inundated criminal justice system, English police no longer investigate burglary and “minor assaults.” As of 2006, if the police catch a mugger, robber, or burglar, or other “minor” criminal in the act, the policy is to release them with a warning rather than to arrest and prosecute them.
Easy access to firearms actually protects people.
Personally, I dislike being mugged, robbed, burgled, and assaulted in *minor* manners, but
...if that floats your boat please continue telling us about the perils of easy access to firearms.
A couple of years ago edX got a bunch of investment money and was being run as a business, with hopes of making money from the course offerings, despite having no clear business plan or strategy for doing so.
(I believe originally the plan was to have companies pay to get lists of high-scoring graduates for potential employees, which didn't work out, and last I talked to [edX chief scientist] Piotr, he said you had something going with Pearson but couldn't elaborate because of NDA.)
What is your business plan and what strategy do you have for making money?
One problem with this analysis is that it doesn't take into account *successful* conspiracies.
Suppose there are conspiracies which succeeded completely - in that the public was defrauded, suspected nothing, and life went on as normal.
If we are using past performance to predict future trends, shouldn't those conspiracies be counted? There's no realistic way to account for or even detect them.
Take for example the 1968 presidential campaign of Richard Nixon.
During that campaign, [incumbent president] Johnson was negotiating with Vietnam to bring an end to the Vietnam war.
Nixon though that this action would ruin his chances of being elected, so he contacted the Vietnamese government and said that if they obstructed talks, they'd get a better deal when he was elected.
(An example of an American interfering with the political process, prolonging a war for 7 more years, with enforced conscription, and causing the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.)
This action was known to Nixon's campaign manager (Mitchell) and several aides. Johnson knew about it (a tape in the Johnson presidential library has Johnson denouncing Nixon for “treason”)
Neither side wanted to push the issue, so it was dropped.
This was a conspiracy, involved several dozen people (including FBI agents), and was monstrously important at the time. It took 50 years for the documents to be released describing the situation. Johnson's tape was released in 2008, and some other files are still hidden.
I don't have a lot of faith in this paper - it doesn't take into account conspiracies that actually succeed.
The first project he created was named Hidden Tear, and malware operators used it to create the Cryptear.B ransomware family. Unfortunately for the malware operators, the ransomware's encryption contained an encryption flaw, left intentionally by Utku in its source code, which allowed him and other security researchers to help victims decrypt their locked files without paying the ransom.
The second project was the EDA2 ransomware, which didn't contain an encryption backdoor, but came with a fully-working C&C server admin panel, which contained a backdoor account.
This second project was used for the Magic ransomware family. The problem is that the operator of this ransomware campaign decided to host the C&C server admin panel on a free hosting provider's infrastructure. Once the hosting provider discovered what the malware operator was up to, it shut down and deleted his account, inadvertently deleting the database with all the encryption keys.
Utku Sen publicly apologized for this incident, and then removed the EDA2 ransomware project from GitHub, but with no doubt, the project is still shared via underground forums and black markets.
So this guy made an open source ransomware project on GitHub with intentional backdoors, which was then downloaded and used, and security researchers then used the backdoors to thwart the ransomers?
Who has a list of which configuration options I need to go into about:config and disable this time?
You must be an old timer!
Programs are configurable! Just go through all the apps and programs that you use on a daily basis and change whatever you want to make the system work to your liking.
All these features are easy to change, and learning a mere handful of methods will get you anywhere you want to go.
1) Go to about.config, click on the "I understand", type in "this.obscure.value", double click it to change value. The "this.obscure.value" is named in a transparent, easily understandable way such as "browser.cache.disk.smart_size.enabled". This enables the "smart size" feature of the caching system. It's obvious what it does, because it's name says it all.
2) Go to start->run->regedit, navigate to "this obscure value", type in "add new value" in DWORD format and set it's value to 1. For instance, to disable the new volume control and go back to the old style, just navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion, create a new key MTCUVC, create a new DWORD EnableMtcUvc, and set its value to 0.
Only old folks think that's not simple, and I don't for the life of me know why!
3) Pick a random number, put "KB" in front of it, and do what's described there. For example, KB3035583 tells you how Microsoft has helpfully introduced "additional capabilities for Windows Update notifications when new updates are available to the user". It's just telling you how Windows 10 is now available. If you want to customize this behaviour, you can use task manager to stop the GWX.exe process. Or, you can go to programs and then click or tap on View installed updates, then scroll down until you see the KB3035583 update, select it, press "uninstall", and then confirm that you want to uninstall it.
Nothing could be simpler, I just *don't get* where these old folks are coming from!
4) Changing things in linux it's even easier! Just go to/etc as root and vi "some-random-file", and change the configuration manually. It's easy to do, because all the configuration files are in one place! For example, remote disks are called "shares", and the process that manages this is called samba, and the file to edit is thus/etc/samba/smb.conf.
What could be easier? The.conf ending lets you know that it's a configuration file!
If you don't know how to use vi, simply type "man vi" and you'll find all the information you need!
Really, I don't understand why old folks don't understand these things - everything is so simple!
PARI is a command-line calculator for exploring mathematics. It's got *lots* of high-level math functions and commands and uses high precision arithmetic (you can set it to use 5 million digit numbers, for example).
For example: type factor(20345) and it will print out the factors of that number.
PARI will let him explore mathematics concepts, and if he's at all interested in mathematics he'll see the commands, research what they are for and how they are relevant, and perhaps discover interesting corners of mathematics that interest him.
It also allows scripting, so it will introduce him to programming concepts such as flow control and loops, without having to worry a lot about data types and I/O formatting.
I've found that the moment you try to correct one of these stories attributing a false statement to candidate-x, you are immediately labelled as candidate-x fan-boy. And it goes down hill from there.
To be fair, I *am* a Trump fan.
For the past decade or so we (ie - Slashdot readership) have lamented the high-level of corruption in politics, and have identified the root cause as campaign contributions in return for political favours(*). A games-theory analysis shows that any normal political candidate will end up catering to the wishes of corporate interests in order to get elected.
As an example, consider [then] Senator Obama's flip flop on telecom immunity six months before the election, and for which he received generous campaign contributions that allowed him to win the presidency.
We've often wished for a candidate who can avoid the soul-selling and do things in the interests of the people. In this election, we have two: Trump and Sanders.
I'm a fan of both. Having a Trump/Sanders election would be the best thing for this nation, and serve as a wakeup call to the elites.
The people are tired of corruption in politics, and want something in return for their votes.
(*) I'm referring to American politics, but it probably applies in other places, such as Canada, the UK, and Australia.
One thing has struck me recently, which is that YouTube allows us to catch out misrepresentations and media bias.
In previous years, we would *only* have the media interpretations of current events. My parents, for instance, would read the newspaper article about some incident or other, and have no way to judge whether the opinions and position were in any way correct.
Nowadays we can easily dig down to the source, and verify what we are told.
The New York Times: “Trump’s claim that illegal Mexican immigrants are ‘rapists.”
Time Magazine: “Trump’s comment that Mexican immigrants are ‘rapists.’”
Associated Press: “Trump called Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals”
CBS News: “Trump defends calling Mexican immigrants ‘rapists.’”
L.A. Times: “describing Mexican immigrants as ‘rapists.’”
Fortune: “in a speech branding Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists.”
Hollywood Reporter: “he referred to Mexican immigrants as ‘rapists.’”
Huffington Post: “He called Latino immigrants ‘criminals’ and ‘rapists.’”
The Washington Post: “He referred to Mexicans as “rapists.”
What he actually said:
They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.
An accurate representation of what he said was "some illegal immigrants are criminals", which is true simply by the law of averages, with the implication that if they went through a vetting procedure we could perhaps filter out the criminal portion.
This was taken so completely out of context that WaPo rephrased it as "He referred to Mexicans as “rapists.", with the implication that he insulted the entire population of another country, and a fair portion of our own citizens.
It's highly interesting to me that, as individuals, we now have the ability to find the evidence and come to our own conclusions, rather than blindly listen to the pronouncements of the elite.
And a little bit, I think that's why Trump's supporters are so immovable. When the MSM cries "but he's a *racist*!", most of the people who were at the rally think "he didn't actually say that".
It's definitely interesting the effect that YouTube has had on the political landscape.
I just got a couple of NanoPi 2's, they're 1.4 GHz, and have embedded wireless on the board.
For $32, you don't need an octopus of wires to power your wifi USB dongle through a USB hub, both of which you need for the Raspberry PI. A NanoPi2, a $6 USB power supply, a 16GB memory card, and you're ready to go.
Of course, feel free to develop for the X86, because it's *such* an elegant architecture...
The client wanted a system to log (plastic injection molding) machine cycles, so I wrote a script to read the GPIO and make entries to a remote MySQL database. Everything except the glue script was off the shelf and open source. He can use any open source DB viewer and make whatever data views he needs.
You can make an IoT device in an afternoon with one of these.
Take for example this one, which shows the American flag over a *burning planet* with the logo "melior diabolus quem scies" ("better the devil you know") around the edge.
Or this one, which is effectively the emblem of the Klingon Empire.
It's either 30% lose a job, or 100% lose a job when fish go extinct. The appeal to emotion jerking is pointless in the face of this little detail.
I agree with your logic, but not the conclusion.
Appeals to emotion are what convinces people. For some reason, logic and evidence don't seem to be very persuasive in real life, so I'm trying to branch out into emotional appeals to see what effect that has. It seems to work in the MSM for various subjects.
(As for example, the recent article showing the number of excess deaths caused by the VW emissions scandal, which is dwarfed by the number of excess deaths due to invasive airport screening, which is higher and has gone on for much longer.)
In any event, "solving the problem" will take more than a blanket statement "just reduce fishing".
Hopefully we can point out the difficulties, and maybe researchers will put more thought into the total problem instead of focusing on narrow issues.
Perhaps the government could pay fishermen not to fish, in the manner that it used to pay certain farmers not to grow certain crops? There's some logic to this: the fishermen incur less cost if they don't have to take their boats out, so the government would have to pay somewhat less than their gross catch worth.
The implication is that we should dial back fishing in order to let the stocks replenish.
Which means, hypothetically, you need to take all the fishing boat owners in, say, Boston Harbor and say "30% of you have to stop fishing".
And with no plan for what to do with the out-of-work owners and their families and some deck hands and their families. Just "stop fishing", that's how to fix the problem.
We actually *don't* know know to fix the problem. We *should* ease up on fishing, but that presents other problems which must then be fixed.
It's really no different than the way you are required to wear visible identification when walking on the sidewalk, or how you are legally obligated to put a return address label on all correspondence that passes through the postal system.
You can make fun of the situation, but I was arrested last year for not having ID while hiking in the woods. The cop clearly stated why I was being arrested, he said in so many words that it was illegal not to carry an ID.
The police have always crossed "just a little bit" over the line, but with the situation as it is now, "just a little bit" means our rights are completely and totally gone.
The elephant in the room, the thing that no one is talking about, is that there's a right way to do this.
If you have someone you suspect, you can peek into their system specifically using targetted means. Execute a "sneak and peek" search warrant and install a keylogger, for instance. Bug their house, tap their phone, put a tail on them, and so on.
All of these measures are effective, but they require warrants and reasonable evidence.
Also, the danger from terrorists is vanishingly small, compared to a lot of other dangers in daily life. Focusing on the backdoors is simply not warranted from the amount of danger that ISIS presents in this country.
Slashdot Mirror
Another fine idea.
I too would find these types of articles interesting. It would contribute to making Slashdot a primary news source instead of a regurgitator/aggregator.
Over the years, Slashdot has changed it's style sheets to introduce lots and lots of whitespace.
The site *used* to present a lot more information in a lot less space, and the signal-to-noise ration was much higher. You could see many more articles on the front page, see many more comments on one page and so on.
Every time the style changed, people complained.
We're now at the point where the information is watered down so much that about half the front page is vertical whitespace.
Get rid of some of it! Make the front page more information dense, so we can quickly see if there is something there of interest without having to mouse around the page.
I don't know if you are interested in this but...
During the 2nd war in Iraq, one of the most interesting accounts was a lone blogger in Baghdad who made nightly posts about what was going on and his views on the situation. He wasn't a journalist or anything, just a guy in an apartment watching missiles destroy buildings in his city. Sadly, he wasn't allowed to continue his reporting after the fall of the regime.
Since we're nerds, it should be possible to get interesting views from conflict areas around the globe in an anonymous manner. Perhaps partner with WikiLeaks to get anonymous interviews and points of view from these areas.
They say that the first casualty of war is the truth, but we're now living in an age where the average reader can dig down to find original sources for some of the media bias and spin.
I would love to read the (anonymous) views of a Chinese engineer, or Indian customer support person, or a Cuban hacker, or Ukranian spammer.
I would find it much more interesting than a talking-head video of some software package founder.
If you're interested in being a primary news source, having the occasional "scoop" where the MSM refers to Slashdot as the breaking story, and have the courage for a high-level of journalistic integrity, then you could do this. Let WikiLeaks handle the anonymity and authentication, you just post the interviews.
It's not for the faint of heart, but it's something you could do.
I understand the need to make revenue, but advertizing portals also serve malware and misleading scams, and use up a ton of bandwidth.
You could lead the way to a workable advertizing policy by allowing ads which are "image and link only".
Only allow advertising which is a clickable image link. Make it their job to count click-through, and don't bother with counting impressions. Or if you do, supply them with the impression count instead of letting them do it through javascript.
Only allow advertising images hosted from your own servers, make a "no flashing, blinking, annoying" policy and stick to it. Set up a directory of images and choose one at every page view.
A lot of advertisers will balk at doing this, but if you hold firm and initially seed your stash with free advertizing to a few open source projects (such as SourceForge or Mozilla or Apache), advertisers will begin to see the light and want in.
(I would totally accept ads under those conditions!)
======
Slashdot should be a high-class establishment. Try to vet your ads with an eye towards clarity and simplicity, with a theme that doesn't insult the intelligence of the reader.
For low class examples, do a google image search on "go daddy ad". Seeing a beautiful woman in underwear is appealing, but it makes the site look like trash.
For high class examples, look at some of the ads in Scientific American (googling doesn't work for this) or the New Yorker.
Again, you may have to dig your heels in and "lead the way" before advertisers begin to see the light.
But if you can make it work, the rest of the internet might follow suit...
======
About 2 weeks before the November elections things go to crap on this site. If it's a presidential election, it goes to crap about 6 weeks beforehand, and reaches insanely fevered pitch starting 2 weeks before.
It will *definitely* happen this year, due to the non-typical candidate choices.
Tamp down new accounts registered during these times, so that a hundred paid "candidate XXX" supporters and congressional aides don't waste all of our time.
Maybe if accounts formed during that time only posted at level 0 until after the election, or maybe turn off new accounts (with an informative message) for a couple of weeks, or maybe allow accounts but defer activating them until after the election.
Note that I am referring to NEW accounts, and only those NEW accounts which are registered during the runup weeks! Regular accounts and long-term readers should be unaffected.
======
On the subject of high class, it would be nice if you limited yourself to ONE April fool's prank on April 1st.
And if you do even that one, note that an "this is obviously absurd" article is NOT an April Fool's prank. A good prank actually fools people, and the best ones fool people for more than a minute. It should be completely believable, and preferably engage the reader emotionally. Like the Piltdown man.
Thank you.
That's a well-formed and unassailable argument, I won't be using that study as a reference in the future. If Slashdot had the "delete post" option I would use it.
Your post does not address the core argument (guns good/guns bad), but that's OK.
Let's pick this up again in the next gun control article discussion.
An informed argument is so refreshing. Bravo!
Firstly, you are citing news articles and not published research, and others might point out the gap in credibility between our arguments. For my part, I know that your sources reflect publish papers so it's all good.
The difference between our arguments is this: I claim that looking at *gun* deaths is misleading, because the vast majority of gun incidents resolve in favor of the gun owner and do not lead to death.
The statistic of measure should be the overall fatality rate (death from all causes), not the "death by gun" rate.
So for a counter example, note that the rate of "death by anaphalactic shock" shoots way up in areas that have lots of vaccinations.
Should we thus avoid vaccinations?
All of your sources are referring to gun deaths. We could ban guns in an attempt to reduce these specific types of death, but if it is at the expense of the overall fatality rate, it's not the prudent move.
Please at least make some make better argument for gun ownership
I don't know what would make a better argument than citing research published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, by, you know, a constitutional lawyer and a PhD in criminology.
But I'm not averse to learning.
What would you recommend as a better argument? How would you go about it?
I love how a well thought out post that is backed by actual research is criticized by a bunch of anonymous cowards....
Oh, wait until the election.
Guns don't kill, unregulated easy access to firearms does.
Um... actually...
Firstly, private gun sales are legal. Facebook is making a blanket policy which is politically charged, which could also be applied to arranging abortions, distasteful speech, consensual sex of any non-mainstream type, and a host of others that anyone can come up with after a few minutes thought.
So in effect, they are suppressing behaviour that is completely legal.
Secondly, although guns do seem to kill a lot of people, the overall statistic of importance to check is "average expected lifespan", which is much *higher* in areas where there is easy legal access to guns.
To put this another way, if you let your kids play in the yard of a gun owner, their chance of being killed by that gun go way up, but their chances of death by *all causes* go down. If you can't maintain proper nutrition or medicine for a time because you got robbed, it affects your overall lifespan. If your neighbor has guns, it has a protective effect on you because criminals tend to go elsewhere, and so on.
Thirdly, if you like to compare England to the US, consider this Harvard study which finds (journal page 656):
[...] despite constant and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United States saw progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence in the 1990s.On the other hand, the same time period in the United Kingdom saw a constant and dramatic increase in violent crime to which England’s response was evermore drastic gun control including, eventually, banning and confiscating all handguns and many types of long guns. Nevertheless, criminal violence rampantly increased so that by 2000 England surpassed the United States to become one of the developed world’s most violenceridden nations..
To conserve the resources of the inundated criminal justice system, English police no longer investigate burglary and “minor assaults.” As of 2006, if the police catch a mugger, robber, or burglar, or other “minor” criminal in the act, the policy is to release them with a warning rather than to arrest and prosecute them.
Easy access to firearms actually protects people.
Personally, I dislike being mugged, robbed, burgled, and assaulted in *minor* manners, but
A couple of years ago edX got a bunch of investment money and was being run as a business, with hopes of making money from the course offerings, despite having no clear business plan or strategy for doing so.
(I believe originally the plan was to have companies pay to get lists of high-scoring graduates for potential employees, which didn't work out, and last I talked to [edX chief scientist] Piotr, he said you had something going with Pearson but couldn't elaborate because of NDA.)
What is your business plan and what strategy do you have for making money?
One problem with this analysis is that it doesn't take into account *successful* conspiracies.
Suppose there are conspiracies which succeeded completely - in that the public was defrauded, suspected nothing, and life went on as normal.
If we are using past performance to predict future trends, shouldn't those conspiracies be counted? There's no realistic way to account for or even detect them.
Take for example the 1968 presidential campaign of Richard Nixon.
During that campaign, [incumbent president] Johnson was negotiating with Vietnam to bring an end to the Vietnam war.
Nixon though that this action would ruin his chances of being elected, so he contacted the Vietnamese government and said that if they obstructed talks, they'd get a better deal when he was elected.
(An example of an American interfering with the political process, prolonging a war for 7 more years, with enforced conscription, and causing the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of Americans.)
This action was known to Nixon's campaign manager (Mitchell) and several aides. Johnson knew about it (a tape in the Johnson presidential library has Johnson denouncing Nixon for “treason”)
Neither side wanted to push the issue, so it was dropped.
This was a conspiracy, involved several dozen people (including FBI agents), and was monstrously important at the time. It took 50 years for the documents to be released describing the situation. Johnson's tape was released in 2008, and some other files are still hidden.
I don't have a lot of faith in this paper - it doesn't take into account conspiracies that actually succeed.
The first project he created was named Hidden Tear, and malware operators used it to create the Cryptear.B ransomware family. Unfortunately for the malware operators, the ransomware's encryption contained an encryption flaw, left intentionally by Utku in its source code, which allowed him and other security researchers to help victims decrypt their locked files without paying the ransom.
The second project was the EDA2 ransomware, which didn't contain an encryption backdoor, but came with a fully-working C&C server admin panel, which contained a backdoor account.
This second project was used for the Magic ransomware family. The problem is that the operator of this ransomware campaign decided to host the C&C server admin panel on a free hosting provider's infrastructure. Once the hosting provider discovered what the malware operator was up to, it shut down and deleted his account, inadvertently deleting the database with all the encryption keys.
Utku Sen publicly apologized for this incident, and then removed the EDA2 ransomware project from GitHub, but with no doubt, the project is still shared via underground forums and black markets.
So this guy made an open source ransomware project on GitHub with intentional backdoors, which was then downloaded and used, and security researchers then used the backdoors to thwart the ransomers?
I am totally in awe of this person. Bravo!
Who has a list of which configuration options I need to go into about:config and disable this time?
You must be an old timer!
Programs are configurable! Just go through all the apps and programs that you use on a daily basis and change whatever you want to make the system work to your liking.
All these features are easy to change, and learning a mere handful of methods will get you anywhere you want to go.
1) Go to about.config, click on the "I understand", type in "this.obscure.value", double click it to change value. The "this.obscure.value" is named in a transparent, easily understandable way such as "browser.cache.disk.smart_size.enabled". This enables the "smart size" feature of the caching system. It's obvious what it does, because it's name says it all.
2) Go to start->run->regedit, navigate to "this obscure value", type in "add new value" in DWORD format and set it's value to 1. For instance, to disable the new volume control and go back to the old style, just navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion, create a new key MTCUVC, create a new DWORD EnableMtcUvc, and set its value to 0.
Only old folks think that's not simple, and I don't for the life of me know why!
3) Pick a random number, put "KB" in front of it, and do what's described there. For example, KB3035583 tells you how Microsoft has helpfully introduced "additional capabilities for Windows Update notifications when new updates are available to the user". It's just telling you how Windows 10 is now available. If you want to customize this behaviour, you can use task manager to stop the GWX.exe process. Or, you can go to programs and then click or tap on View installed updates, then scroll down until you see the KB3035583 update, select it, press "uninstall", and then confirm that you want to uninstall it.
Nothing could be simpler, I just *don't get* where these old folks are coming from!
4) Changing things in linux it's even easier! Just go to /etc as root and vi "some-random-file", and change the configuration manually. It's easy to do, because all the configuration files are in one place! For example, remote disks are called "shares", and the process that manages this is called samba, and the file to edit is thus /etc/samba/smb.conf.
What could be easier? The .conf ending lets you know that it's a configuration file!
If you don't know how to use vi, simply type "man vi" and you'll find all the information you need!
Really, I don't understand why old folks don't understand these things - everything is so simple!
Get him is a computer and install PARI.
PARI is a command-line calculator for exploring mathematics. It's got *lots* of high-level math functions and commands and uses high precision arithmetic (you can set it to use 5 million digit numbers, for example).
For example: type factor(20345) and it will print out the factors of that number.
PARI will let him explore mathematics concepts, and if he's at all interested in mathematics he'll see the commands, research what they are for and how they are relevant, and perhaps discover interesting corners of mathematics that interest him.
It also allows scripting, so it will introduce him to programming concepts such as flow control and loops, without having to worry a lot about data types and I/O formatting.
tl;dr Voting for Hitler directly isn't an improvement just because it cuts out a middle-man.
Trump isn't Hitler!!!
Hitler could paint...
I've found that the moment you try to correct one of these stories attributing a false statement to candidate-x, you are immediately labelled as candidate-x fan-boy. And it goes down hill from there.
To be fair, I *am* a Trump fan.
For the past decade or so we (ie - Slashdot readership) have lamented the high-level of corruption in politics, and have identified the root cause as campaign contributions in return for political favours(*). A games-theory analysis shows that any normal political candidate will end up catering to the wishes of corporate interests in order to get elected.
As an example, consider [then] Senator Obama's flip flop on telecom immunity six months before the election, and for which he received generous campaign contributions that allowed him to win the presidency.
We've often wished for a candidate who can avoid the soul-selling and do things in the interests of the people. In this election, we have two: Trump and Sanders.
I'm a fan of both. Having a Trump/Sanders election would be the best thing for this nation, and serve as a wakeup call to the elites.
The people are tired of corruption in politics, and want something in return for their votes.
(*) I'm referring to American politics, but it probably applies in other places, such as Canada, the UK, and Australia.
One thing has struck me recently, which is that YouTube allows us to catch out misrepresentations and media bias.
In previous years, we would *only* have the media interpretations of current events. My parents, for instance, would read the newspaper article about some incident or other, and have no way to judge whether the opinions and position were in any way correct.
Nowadays we can easily dig down to the source, and verify what we are told.
As an example that everyone knows about, we can look to some of the things said about Trump:
What he actually said:
They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.
An accurate representation of what he said was "some illegal immigrants are criminals", which is true simply by the law of averages, with the implication that if they went through a vetting procedure we could perhaps filter out the criminal portion.
This was taken so completely out of context that WaPo rephrased it as "He referred to Mexicans as “rapists.", with the implication that he insulted the entire population of another country, and a fair portion of our own citizens.
It's highly interesting to me that, as individuals, we now have the ability to find the evidence and come to our own conclusions, rather than blindly listen to the pronouncements of the elite.
And a little bit, I think that's why Trump's supporters are so immovable. When the MSM cries "but he's a *racist*!", most of the people who were at the rally think "he didn't actually say that".
It's definitely interesting the effect that YouTube has had on the political landscape.
Thanks - I'll look into that.
According to the MySQL website, 5.6 is the latest available production release.
I don't know the answer to your question, it sounds like you should ask the makers for their release schedule.
I just got a couple of NanoPi 2's, they're 1.4 GHz, and have embedded wireless on the board.
For $32, you don't need an octopus of wires to power your wifi USB dongle through a USB hub, both of which you need for the Raspberry PI. A NanoPi2, a $6 USB power supply, a 16GB memory card, and you're ready to go.
Of course, feel free to develop for the X86, because it's *such* an elegant architecture...
The client wanted a system to log (plastic injection molding) machine cycles, so I wrote a script to read the GPIO and make entries to a remote MySQL database. Everything except the glue script was off the shelf and open source. He can use any open source DB viewer and make whatever data views he needs.
You can make an IoT device in an afternoon with one of these.
Holy crap! You're right!
Take for example this one, which shows the American flag over a *burning planet* with the logo "melior diabolus quem scies" ("better the devil you know") around the edge.
Or this one, which is effectively the emblem of the Klingon Empire.
Or the demonic inverted pentagram.
Or a demonic mask showing planes coming back from having DROPPED AN ATOMIC BOMB ON THE PLANET!!! (Caption: "we own the night")
Ye gads!
It's either 30% lose a job, or 100% lose a job when fish go extinct. The appeal to emotion jerking is pointless in the face of this little detail.
I agree with your logic, but not the conclusion.
Appeals to emotion are what convinces people. For some reason, logic and evidence don't seem to be very persuasive in real life, so I'm trying to branch out into emotional appeals to see what effect that has. It seems to work in the MSM for various subjects.
(As for example, the recent article showing the number of excess deaths caused by the VW emissions scandal, which is dwarfed by the number of excess deaths due to invasive airport screening, which is higher and has gone on for much longer.)
In any event, "solving the problem" will take more than a blanket statement "just reduce fishing".
Hopefully we can point out the difficulties, and maybe researchers will put more thought into the total problem instead of focusing on narrow issues.
Perhaps the government could pay fishermen not to fish, in the manner that it used to pay certain farmers not to grow certain crops? There's some logic to this: the fishermen incur less cost if they don't have to take their boats out, so the government would have to pay somewhat less than their gross catch worth.
We know how to fix this problem.
The implication is that we should dial back fishing in order to let the stocks replenish.
Which means, hypothetically, you need to take all the fishing boat owners in, say, Boston Harbor and say "30% of you have to stop fishing".
And with no plan for what to do with the out-of-work owners and their families and some deck hands and their families. Just "stop fishing", that's how to fix the problem.
We actually *don't* know know to fix the problem. We *should* ease up on fishing, but that presents other problems which must then be fixed.
It's really no different than the way you are required to wear visible identification when walking on the sidewalk, or how you are legally obligated to put a return address label on all correspondence that passes through the postal system.
You can make fun of the situation, but I was arrested last year for not having ID while hiking in the woods. The cop clearly stated why I was being arrested, he said in so many words that it was illegal not to carry an ID.
The police have always crossed "just a little bit" over the line, but with the situation as it is now, "just a little bit" means our rights are completely and totally gone.
The elephant in the room, the thing that no one is talking about, is that there's a right way to do this.
If you have someone you suspect, you can peek into their system specifically using targetted means. Execute a "sneak and peek" search warrant and install a keylogger, for instance. Bug their house, tap their phone, put a tail on them, and so on.
All of these measures are effective, but they require warrants and reasonable evidence.
Also, the danger from terrorists is vanishingly small, compared to a lot of other dangers in daily life. Focusing on the backdoors is simply not warranted from the amount of danger that ISIS presents in this country.